ALAMOSA — For decades, a mushroom farm in the San Luis Valley was celebrated as a major employer that gave an economic future to Guatemalans who fled civil war in the 1980s.

Its manager, Baljit Nanda, was described as a “mushroom magnate.” Button, crimini and portobello mushrooms — grown, plucked and packaged by migrant workers laboring in a 10-acre metal warehouse northeast of Alamosa — were sold to grocery stores like Whole Foods and King Soopers.

But when the farm quietly closed last year, it owed thousands of dollars in unpaid wages to employees, some of whom were injured on the job and subjected to unsafe working conditions, according to more than a dozen interviews with former employees, their family members and community advocates.

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Dozens of interviews show hidden perils at Colorado Mushroom Farm, which sold produce at Whole Foods and King Soopers before going bankrupt.

BRUSH — The person who decided “Homegrown Happiness!” should be the tagline for this Eastern Plains town may have had someone like Bradley Bass in mind. Bass, 31, works at the high school he attended. He’s a perpetual rule-follower, and married his high school sweetheart. She laughs at the times she’d tried — unsuccessfully — to get him to jaywalk.

But Google Bass’ name and a different picture emerges: Not the caring and quiet assistant principal whose family has deep roots in Brush, a town of 5,300 residents. But a school administrator referenced in multiple police department news releases — and charged this summer with possessing child pornography.

Bass’ case has for months riveted and divided this conservative community, once a pitstop for cowboys driving cattle from Texas to Montana. Officials write the town name with an exclamation point — Brush! — and highlight its rural charm.

This story was based off dozens of in-person interviews, police documents, body camera footage, and other records obtained under public information laws.

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Updates:

11/21/2022: A shorter version of the story is here, with updates showing a case against Bass’ superior was thrown out by a district judge and the Brush police chief is leaving to take a job elsewhere. MORE HERE.

12/7/2022: An Eastern Colorado school police officer at the center of a controversial sexting investigation admitted in court testimony that he took no notes and didn’t file reports about key events in a case that could send an administrator to prison for 12 years. His role in the case highlights the lack of consistent training for school resource officers, and what obligations they have to respond to potentially urgent violations of school policy or law. No agency oversees school resource officers in Colorado and there is no national requirement that they receive specialized training. MORE HERE.

12/8/2022: Colorado has no mandatory training on how to investigate school sexting. Educators face prison time if they do it wrong. MORE HERE.

It smells like pond water, leaves laundry dirty and kills the houseplants. It sometimes comes out of the faucet brown. And residents frequently get notices that the levels of two potential carcinogens in their tap water are too high.

“I don’t even give it to my animals,” Colorado City resident Mariah Norvell said of the tap water.

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DENVER (AP) — More than a dozen candidates campaigning to be top law enforcement officials in counties across Colorado are running on a unique platform: Not enforcing the law.

These candidates fit the profile of a loose movement sometimes referred to as “constitutional sheriffs” whose members promise to act as a bulwark against government overreach and laws passed by state legislatures that they deem illegal.

At the top of their list in Colorado is the “red flag” law that gives judges the ability to order the temporary seizure of guns from people considered a threat to themselves or others.

Some also reject the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and coronavirus precautions, issues that have become polarizing litmus tests dividing the far-right and more mainstream conservatives.

“No boss, no governor, no socialist agenda will take away my focus to fight for and protect our constitution,” John Anderson, a sheriff candidate in Douglas County, says on his campaign website.

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McALLEN — Juan Lopez is in the ambulance bay of a McAllen hospital, zipping a gauzy blue jumpsuit over a Polo button-down and work slacks. Two well-worn stretchers are in the back of his Cadillac Escalade, a pack of Marlboros near the gear shift.

It’s Saturday morning in South Texas, and the corpse of a 60-something-year-old needs to get to a funeral home — specifically, a refrigerated truck behind a funeral home that’s run out of storage space. The deceased coronavirus patient goes in the back of the Escalade, and Lopez heads to retrieve a body from another hospital’s morgue.

These are the first jobs of the day — and far from the last. Lopez will pick up 16 bodies Saturday, wake up at 2 a.m. Sunday and transport 22 more, including a husband and wife both infected with the virus.

Lopez, 45, is a courier of the dead, contracting with funeral homes and the county to pick up and deliver bodies. In normal times, he handled around 10 jobs a week. But this isn’t a normal time.

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This story was based on a day spent shadowing a man charged with picking up and transporting dead bodies — from homes, hospital beds, hospital morgues and refrigerated trucks to funeral homes and crematoriums — during the height of the coronavirus surge in South Texas.

The symptoms came quickly. Body aches. Fever. Cough.

On July 11, Adolfo “Fito” Alvarado Jr. wrote in his journal that he was “not doing well at all” and had taken to sleeping in the garage of his Mission home despite the boiling South Texas heat.

“I’m freezing and it relaxes me and I fall asleep… my breathing has been really getting to me and my cough is horrible,” he wrote.

Alvarado with his great grandson Jacah “Jake” Vair in 2019.

Adolfo Alvarado with his great grandson Jacah “Jake” Vair in 2019. Credit: Courtesy of the Alvarado family

“Scary feeling when you can’t breathe… eating very little…. I couldn’t even tell you what hurts; everything.”

His entry the next day was brief: “I feel horrible," he wrote in part. "My body is in great pain."

In swift succession, Alvarado, his wife and his daughter-in-law tested positive for COVID-19. Medics were called but hospitals in the Rio Grande Valley were so packed that there was a two-day wait to be admitted by ambulance, they said.

So on July 13, Alvarado’s son Aaron fashioned a makeshift pallet in the bed of his truck, helped his dad — who was barely able to walk — get in, and turned on his hazard lights. He made the 9-mile drive to Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, in Edinburg, hoping the staff could find a spare bed for one of their own colleagues.

A masked worker was standing outside the emergency room when Aaron drove up. He got out of the truck, Alvarado lying prone in the back. A nurse came out.

I have my dad, Aaron said. He’s an employee here — a chaplain.

For three years, Alvarado had worked for DHR Health Hospice, visiting families from Roma to Brownsville, comforting the living and praying with the dying. He was a healthy 70 year old who phoned his three kids every day and called his wife “La Beauty.”

Now, the coronavirus had come for him.

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This story was based on hours of interviews, diary entries of the deceased and recorded phone calls the deceased man had with family members before this death.

COLORADO CITY — It’s 10 a.m. on a stuffy August morning and Roxie Frank is about to make what’s become a routine trip for residents of this Colorado town: Drive 60 miles to pick up her mail at the post office in Pueblo.

The hourlong trip is the latest inconvenience for the roughly 2,500 residents of Colorado City, where for decades the local post office was attached to other businesses. The arrangement worked fairly well before the pandemic. But in recent months two business owners quit, one after the other, citing lack of supplies, training and support from the U.S. Postal Service.

Residents were notified in August that their closest mail stop would be shut down and that they’d need to commute to Pueblo to check their P.O. boxes.

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” a handwritten sign posted in the window of the former post office said.

Since then, residents have complained about the cost and time needed to pick up their mail, especially with gas prices hovering around $4 a gallon. Others say that even when they reach the Pueblo post office, they often don’t get all the letters they’re expecting.

Frank, for example, a veteran, got just one large envelope on a recent Saturday. It was junk mail.

Connie Resewehr, 75, who stood in line behind Frank at the Pueblo post office, was expecting to get 16 pieces of mail including utility bills. She walked out later with a thin stack of letters. No bills.

Sarah Grablauskas sometimes heads to Pueblo several times a week to pick up mailed medication for her husband, George, a veteran who jokes he’s like Elvis Presley because he takes some 400 pills a month. He’s waiting on a birthday present he thinks got lost in the mail. Sarah Grablauskas never received her primary ballot.

“Everybody thinks, well, when you buy a house anywhere in the United States, you’re going to get mail,” she said, from the couple’s home in the Applewood neighborhood. Not so, she said.

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See below, under “Impact & Investigations,” for more.

As wind farms flood the Eastern Plains, the renewable energy alternative is now running into the same concerns that originally plagued the fossil fuel industry.

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