DENVER — A month and a half on the job, and a new investigator inside the Denver District Attorney’s office helped take 19 firearms from a man accused of domestic violence.
He can do that using a 2013 Colorado law, which requires anyone arrested of domestic violence to relinquish their firearms within 24 hours.
“The correlation between domestic violence and catastrophic things that happen when they have access to firearms is just undeniable,” said Maggie Conboy, chief deputy district attorney and supervisor of the special victims unit for the Denver District Attorney’s Office.
Conboy supervises the new investigator who heads the Firearms Relinquishment unit. The officer works with a domestic violence team at the Rose Andom Center, helping identify defendants who may have undisclosed firearms.
“Everyone that’s arrested would have a constitutional right to remain silent – so you go into court after you’ve been arrested for domestic violence and you don’t have to admit whether or not you have access to weapons, or whether you possess weapons,” Conboy said.
The investigator, who requested not to be on 9NEWS as part of this story to maintain a level of anonymity, uses other means to figure out if an offender hasn’t relinquished guns.
“He will look at all of the witness statements, he listens to the 911 call,” Conboy said.
The investigator also uses social media, she said.
“These guys love to post pictures of themselves holding their weapons,” she said.
After gathering enough evidence, the district attorney’s office can go to court, asking a judge for a means to take the weapons. They could ask for a violation of a restraining order, since the defendant is court-ordered to relinquish the weapons, Conboy said.
Conboy said the new investigator was a priority for her boss, DA Beth McCann. McCann was in the state legislature when the domestic violence bill gun bill passed.
McCann’s office is one of the first in the nation with an investigator like it, Conboy said.
“We needed to become creative,” Conboy said.
“He’s gotten calls from a couple of mothers saying I was in the courtroom and I saw that my son has been ordered to relinquish – let me help you – and he’s had, in two different occasions, mothers come down and relinquish,” she said.
In the case of the 19 firearms, Conboy said the victim in the case gathered most of the weapons from the home while the defendant was in court. After released on bond, the defendant was arrested in a DUI case in Summit County, where police there confiscated another firearm, according to Denver District Attorney spokeswoman Carolyn Tyler.
Conboy said after the guns were taken away from the defendant, his father wrote a thank you letter to the office, acknowledging his son was under mental health stress and saying he hopes his son can get help in the meantime.
Colorado passed a separate gun control law, the red flag law, in 2019. It allows a judge to order someone's guns to be temporarily confiscated if that person is deemed a risk. The law goes into effect next year.
RELATED: What are red flag gun laws?
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