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Until late last week, the gossip around town concerned the diminished tourist flow. Then it shifted quickly to the lawsuit filed by four men who say that, during their teen years, they were sexually molested by Gary Danhauer. He was then the youth minister for the First Baptist Church of Salida and the leader of Boy Scout Explorer Post 2070, which specialized in search and rescue.
The suit, filed in federal court, charges that local authorities conspired to deprive the four men of their civil rights by failing to investigate their complaints until the statute of limitations had run out.
How could that be a civil-rights violation? Well, you do have a right to sue people who have harmed you, and a right to have crimes against you investigated. If the police fail to act in time, then they've deprived you of your rights as a citizen. And it's probably worse if they deterred you from conducting your own investigation, or told you that nobody else had complained even if others had.
I have some understanding of why the local police department and sheriff's office might have moved reluctantly in any investigation of Gary Danhauer.
In the spring of 1978, right after I moved to Salida to edit the local newspaper, his Explorers were practicing rappelling at an old quarry east of town. There was an accident, and one young man died.
Joe Stewart, the county coroner, convened an inquest, which determined that the death was a tragic accident, not the result of anything criminal.
As we reported on the inquest, various influential people would visit the newspaper office, urging us to subdue, or even omit, coverage of the inquest.
Gary Danhauer and his Scouts do a lot of good
here,
I was told, and you're tearing the town apart
with this. It was just an accident, and it's not something
people should be dwelling on.
Now, the coroner's inquest was a public hearing. It wasn't as though we were going out of our way at the newspaper to cause trouble for Gary Danhauer. Yet there were people who tried to apply pressure to quash even routine reporting of a public event of public interest.
So I can imagine the pressures that could have been put on the police and sheriff's departments if they had started a serious investigation of charges that Danhauer had molested teen-aged boys in his scout troop. It was weird enough at the newspaper, and all we were doing was reporting a coroner's inquest that exonerated Danhauer.
Such attempts to manipulate news coverage are not confined to Baptists attempting to protect the reputation of their youth minister, of course. That was part of the other thread of local gossip -- complaints about the diminished tourist flow.
The complainers had a theory. During June, the Evil Front Range Media Conspiracy decided to present nothing but negative news about the mountains: floods, drownings, wash-outs, rockslides, snow-clad campgrounds, etc. Thus urban residents would go to Elitch's and Rockies games, rather than the mountains, thereby enriching the Wicked City and impoverishing us Virtuous Yokels.
They could be right. Looking back at the news from that period, I can see that the stories could have had positive spins:
Rather than mention rivers out of their banks, we could
read that of the 691,200 acres in Chaffee County, the
vast majority -- at least 680,000, according to the
regional tourism council -- were above water
yesterday.
Why dwell on the negative when it comes to whitewater
adventures? Enjoying record flows in the Numbers,
Brown's Canyon and the Royal Gorge, 9,482 people took raft
trips last week, and 9,480 of them arrived safely at their
destinations.
As for all that lingering white crud on trails and
campgrounds, mountain snowshoe trails and cross-country
ski routes promise an extended adventure in 1995 as they
remain available for a record interval. In many years,
their cover diminishes in April, but in this special year,
they remain attractive into June, even July. And local
enthusiasts note that there's not the expense and bother of
a tent when the raw material for snow caves is so
abundant.
Even a road-closure occasioned by a rockslide could be
presented in an attractive way. Motorists along
Interstate 70 yesterday had a chance to stop and smell the
roses, which were in glorious and profuse bloom along many
stretches of the highway. Texans, in particular, were
thrilled to discover that their cherished yellow blossoms
also flourished in Colorado. Science-minded motorists were
excited by the dynamic geologic processes which occurred
before their very eyes.
And there's got to be a way to present the Danhauer
lawsuit, so as not to discourage people from buying local
real estate: Dozens of former scouts affirmed yesterday
that they had never been approached by their scoutmaster,
and the Chaffee County Sheriff's Office announced that it
pursued an aggressive investigation on more than 98 percent
of all reported serious cases....
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