When parolee Evan Ebel slipped his ankle monitor off and dropped out of sight last month, his disappearance was barely a blip on the radar of the Department of Corrections.
The alert that sounded was just one of about 800 that corrections officials field every month, and they were in no rush to check on him, despite knowing he was a violent, high-risk offender.
It took them five days to realize Ebel was on the run and an additional day to seek a warrant for his arrest, according to DOC documents released Tuesday.
But by then, pizza delivery driver Nathan Leon and prisons chief Tom Clements had been killed, and Ebel was speeding south in his black Cadillac DeVille. Ebel would be fatally wounded the next day in a shootout with Texas lawmen.
The DOC documents offer the latest glimpse into how authorities had ample reason to put Ebel back behind bars before Leon and Clements were killed. On Monday, a district court apologized for a clerical error that resulted in Ebel’s release from prison four years too soon.
As far as corrections officials were concerned, Ebel was in compliance with the limits of his parole from the time of his Jan. 28 release from Sterling Correctional Facility, according to the DOC documents.
He made scheduled visits to his parole officer, placed daily calls to an automatic monitoring system and passed at least three urine-analysis tests, the documents show. Ebel even called expressing concern at one point when the computer system failed to schedule one of the tests.
But that all changed March 14, when contractor Behavioral Interventions received a “tamper alert” at 1:54 p.m., the documents show. BI notified Ebel’s parole officer about the tamper alert at 4:15 a.m. on March 15.
On an average of 817 times every month, ankle bracelets on Colorado inmates sound an alarm because of tampering, equipment errors and false alarms, said DOC spokeswoman Alison Morgan. The state has 1,500 parolees on the alarms.
“There are a myriad of reasons that ankle bracelet alarms go off,” Morgan said. “Parole officers decide on a case-by-case basis depending on each parolee. When Ebel was released on parole, he was completely compliant. There were no red flags.”
The documents indicate DOC officials believed for several days that Ebel’s device might simply have malfunctioned.
BI’s reaction to Ebel’s alarm was to repeatedly leave messages asking him to voluntarily report to their offices on March 16 for repair of the ankle bracelet. But by March 15, Ebel had also stopped calling Web-based Integrated Support Environment, a case management tracking system he was supposed to call daily to report his movements.
“Tamper has not cleared yet,” according to a March 16 report.
On March 17, the day Leon was killed, a contractor notified Ebel’s parole officer that Ebel had not yet responded, the documents show. Ebel had a 2 p.m. curfew on Sundays, but there is no indication he was visited that day.
The next day, state officials contacted Ebel’s family “regarding parolee’s status.”
After Ebel failed for several days to respond to his parole officer’s orders to report about the ankle bracelet, a parole officer visited Ebel’s Commerce City home on March 19 and determined he was not there.
According to a parole curfew, Ebel was to be in his home by 6 p.m.
The parole officers determined that “parolee was likely an absconder.” About 8:30 p.m. that day, authorities believe Ebel, possibly dressed in Leon’s Domino’s pizza jacket, shot Clements in the chest when he opened the front door of his Monument home.
The parole officer began writing a complaint to the Colorado Parole Board that same night requesting a warrant for Ebel’s arrest. The documents said Ebel had violated three parole conditions: moving without notifying his parole officer, escaping and repeatedly violating his curfew.
The warrant for Ebel’s arrest was issued the following day, March 20, and Ebel was fatally wounded in Texas on March 21. Morgan said Tuesday there was no guarantee that authorities would have been able to apprehend Ebel even if the arrest warrant had been issued March 14.
While corrections officials believed Ebel was complying with his parole conditions, wheels were already in motion that would lead to the deaths of Leon and Clements.
Court records show that the murder weapon, a 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun, was purchased March 6 by Stevie Marie Ann Vigil, 22, of Commerce City. Records indicate she gave Ebel the gun between March 8 and March 13. Vigil is now facing charges.
Prior to the public release of Ebel’s parole records, Tim Hand, Colorado’s parole director, said in an interview that he would back up his parole officers in their handling of Ebel.
“People can draw their conclusions on their own about how we managed that particular individual,” Hand said. “It’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback, but I’m going to hold my head high and say this officer and these officers connected to that case did an outstanding job.”
He added that the parole system is seeing caseloads even higher than those reported by a legislative staff analyst who reported last month to legislators that parole officers for normal parole cases manage about 69 parolees at a time and those monitoring higher-risk parolees average about 23 parolees at a time.
Hand said parole officers often are carrying as many as 85 cases at a time, much higher than what in the past was considered ideal.
“Nobody out there knows what it is like to have 85 cases you are responsible for when you are managing people who have many, many issues,” Hand said. “They have substance-abuse issues, impulse-control problems and gang affiliations. The list is lengthy. There are the homeless and no resources to help them.”
He added: “I’m proud of the work that our staff does. We’re very committed and passionate about the work we do and the people we’re responsible for. There is a perception that we’re asleep at the wheel, and we’re anything but.”
Hand said he’d like more resources to help monitor parolees and provide them services, but he said there’s only so much money to go around.
“Our legislators have been very supportive and recognize that we do need resources and that we do need the kinds of things that they’re making available to us to reduce the recidivism and to keep the public safe and to bring the offender population back into our community in a safe way,” Hand said. “But is it enough? I’d say no. But this state has also gone through an awful lot of economic challenges too. The legislature is doing the best it can with the limited resources we have had in the last three or four years.”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, denverpost.com/coldcases or twitter.com/kmitchelldp
