Five years almost to the day before Denver police say Elijah Caudill stabbed four strangers on the 16th Street Mall, he stood on a street corner in a small town in western Kentucky, begging for money from passing drivers.
The path he walked from panhandling in the South to being charged with killing two people along the heart of Denver’s downtown shopping district was marked by homelessness, illegal drug use, escalating violence, arrests, jail, prison and severe mental illness that was obvious to everyone around him.
He said he heard voices in his head that told him to “do bad things,” court records show.
Caudill was connected to help several times. When he was arrested for panhandling in Kentucky on Jan. 10, 2020, the home address Caudill gave officers was a residential Denver facility that offers care to mentally ill teens and young adults who don’t respond to traditional treatment methods. And just months before the stabbings, his case was assigned to Bridges of Colorado, a well-regarded program aimed at connecting criminal defendants with mental illness to support and care.
But none of those efforts pulled him from the years-long spiral that ended when officers spotted him running with a bloody butcher-style knife near Union Station earlier this month.
Caudill, 24, is accused of stabbing four strangers along the 16th Street Mall on Jan. 11 and 12 in four separate attacks, with three back-to-back stabbings in the span of 42 minutes in the early evening of Jan. 11, then the fourth just after 8 p.m. Jan. 12. Two people, 71-year-old Celinda Levno and 34-year-old Nicholas Burkett, were killed. Two additional victims were wounded but survived.
A representative of the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, which is representing Caudill in the murder case, declined to comment for this story. In court filings seeking to limit publicity around the case, Caudill’s attorneys wrote that he is “suffering from obvious, severe and debilitating mental illness.”
Caudill’s history of arrests in the five years before the Denver stabbing spree highlights Colorado’s inadequate mental health care system and shows how the criminal justice system, even at its best, is ill-equipped to help people with severe mental illness.
“Could this have been prevented?” said Julie Reiskin, co-executive director at the nonprofit Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition. “I don’t know. Maybe if we had a perfect system that provided top-notch mental health care at the first sign of it for anyone who is incarcerated, yeah — it probably could have been caught, treated, prevented.
“But that means we as a society, we as a state, would have to put a significant amount of resources into it. Which we have said, as a state, we are not willing to do.”
A long string of arrests
Born in Colorado, Caudill attended Thornton High School through the ninth grade and started using illegal drugs when he was 15, according to records provided by the Colorado Department of Corrections.
He told prison officials he was not close with his family and that he has “no friends and likes it that way,” but enjoys painting, skateboarding and outdoor activities, the records show.
Caudill bounced around between Kentucky, Texas and Colorado in recent years — and he was arrested everywhere he went.
After the Kentucky panhandling arrest — to which Caudill pleaded guilty but is still wanted on a bench warrant because he never paid his fines and fees — Caudill was next arrested in Texas, in the county where his grandparents live, on a misdemeanor charge of possession of a controlled substance in May 2021.
His grandparents did not return requests for comment on this story.
Caudill was back in Colorado by August 2021.
That’s when a property manager at a Westminster shopping center told police he approached Caudill, who was homeless, to ask Caudill not to sleep on the property or use the area “for public urination or defecation,” according to an affidavit and a separate petition for a civil protection order.
Caudill then brandished a knife, lunged at the property owner and threatened to stab him, according to the affidavit.
“I will cut your (expletive) throat,” Caudill said, according to the affidavit.
Caudill spent a month in the Adams County jail after that arrest on charges of menacing and assault. He pleaded guilty to assault, was sentenced to two years of probation and released, according to jail and court records.
Over the next year, he spent just a few days in the Adams County jail, their records show, picked up at one point on a Westminster municipal charge of obstructing police. He pleaded guilty to that charge in April 2022, and, a day later, his probation officer moved to revoke his probation in the 2021 menacing case.
He returned to jail for a few days in June 2022, then was re-released on probation. That lasted a few months, until September 2023, when Caudill was arrested for attempting to snatch a purse from a woman in a Thornton Target store.
The woman told police that Caudill appeared to be homeless, and followed her through the store before grabbing her purse and trying to run away with it.
The woman held on to her purse and bystanders intervened to stop the attempted theft. Caudill did not use or show any weapons during that incident, according to an affidavit. He was arrested the day after the attack when he was seen in the area wearing the same clothing as the attacker.
He spent four months in jail, then pleaded guilty in January 2023 to felony theft and was sentenced to 18 months in community corrections in both the purse-snatching case and the older menacing case, court records show. Community corrections consists of residential facilities, better known as halfway houses, that are a step down from jail or prison.
Caudill spent just 12 days in the halfway house before authorities moved to send him to prison, court records show. In the halfway house, he told staff and residents that he heard voices in his head, and that they would tell him to “do bad things.” He would giggle and laugh at inappropriate times and talked to himself, court records show.
In one incident, Caudill was sitting at a table when he suddenly threw a cup and knocked everything off the table. He told a staff member his actions were due to the voices in his head, and that the voices would tell him they were “coming to get him,” according to court records.
Staff at the halfway house scheduled an emergency mental health evaluation for Caudill. They gave him details on how to get to the appointment and fare for a bus ticket, but Caudill refused to go.
He became “very agitated” when staff confronted him about missing the mental health appointment, court records show. They then recommended he be pulled from the halfway house.
A judge agreed.
Caudill was re-sentenced to 15 months in prison on the theft conviction in late March 2023. The judge also sentenced him to a year in jail on the menacing case, to be served concurrently with the prison term.
Caudill entered state custody in early April 2023, and spent the next four months in prison.
He continued to hear voices, prison records show.
In May 2023, he started screaming while participating in “dayhall time,” the records note. He told a correctional officer that “his voices were bothering him today,” but that watching TV helped.
Caudill participated in a handful of classes and activities while in prison, the Department of Corrections records show. He told prison officials he expected to return to homelessness when he was released.
When asked whether Caudill received mental health treatment in prison, Alondra Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for the department, said he completed a “mental health intake” in December 2023, when he was freed on parole.
Caudill was technically paroled in August 2023, but went right back into the Adams County jail to serve his remaining sentence in the 2021 menacing case. He stayed in jail until December 2023.
He lived in a sober-living facility immediately after he was released from jail, his parole records show. He was given snacks, hygiene items, two books of bus tickets and a winter coat. He provided urine samples that were negative for illegal drugs and reported he was regularly taking his medications.
He met with his parole officer regularly for more than a month, the records show. He missed one meeting, but got back with his parole officer on Jan. 22, 2024. He told the officer he was seeking additional treatment and that he felt fine.
Two days later he was arrested again, court records show.
This time, he was in Denver.
Jailed in Denver, then set free
On Jan. 24, 2024, Caudill was at a Denver Cares detox facility on Cherokee Street when a staff member called police and said Caudill had touched her buttocks without permission, according to an affidavit filed against Caudill.
He was arrested, charged with unlawful sexual contact and booked into the Denver County jail.
Within a month, he faced a new charge. An inmate in the jail said Caudill punched him while he was in the shower on Feb. 25, groped him and then stepped away and started masturbating.
Caudill was charged with sexual assault, assault, sexual contact without consent and two counts of indecent exposure.
The next day, Caudill got into a fight with a transgender inmate after the inmate declined to play basketball with Caudill, court records show. Caudill put the inmate into a chokehold and restricted her breathing until she nearly passed out, according to an affidavit filed against him.
Ten minutes later, the two had a second altercation in which Caudill punched the inmate in the face, according to the affidavit. The inmate then fought back, and she put Caudill into a chokehold, squeezing his neck until he struggled to breathe, according to a probable cause statement filed against her.
The two were pulled apart by deputies. Both inmates were checked for injuries and held for investigation of second-degree assault. Caudill was ultimately charged, and the other inmate was not.
Judges set bonds in each of Caudill’s three misdemeanor cases.
He could have left jail if he’d had $350.
He never paid.
In February, a woman told Caudill’s parole officer that he didn’t want to get out of jail, that he was hearing voices again and refusing to take his medications.
Caudill was still in jail in May when he was released from his Department of Corrections parole. He was released because his full sentence ended, said Gonzalez, the department spokeswoman.
As his local cases moved through Denver County Court — he picked up a fourth charge of criminal mischief for allegedly damaging property in the jail in August — authorities recognized his mental health issues, court records show.
They sought an evaluation of his competency — which means they wanted to find out if he was too mentally ill to understand the court process or help to defend himself. Under state law, if defendants are too sick, they cannot be prosecuted until they are healthier.
The judge on Caudill’s cases also appointed a liaison from Bridges of Colorado.
Bridges of Colorado is a state-run office with workers who act as a bridge between Colorado’s criminal justice system and the mental health system. Liaisons, appointed to a case by a judge, help defendants figure out what resources are available and how to access them.
They work with people who are in custody and out of custody, but are only assigned to cases when a defendant has mental health or behavioral health issues. Liaisons most often come into a case after competency has been raised, said Jennifer Turner, Bridges executive director. Defendants with mental health issues often also have substance use disorder, but the program’s first focus is on defendants with mental health issues, she said.
Liaisons are a go-between. They might help defendants set up their health insurance benefits, help defendants find a program for affordable housing or give out a bus pass or Uber voucher. They might help a homeless defendant find a place to stash his belongings where the stuff won’t be stolen, so that the defendant feels able to attend a court hearing instead of skipping. Liaisons might attend that hearing with the defendant to help calm his nerves, or meet a defendant as she is released from jail to point the defendant to a particular shelter or facility where an open bed waits.
Bridges isn’t a residential program. Liaisons don’t provide mental health care, don’t take custody of defendants, don’t enforce defendants’ attendance in court. The program is voluntary for defendants, who can choose to participate or not.
In some rural jurisdictions, liaisons play an outsized role in defendants’ cases because it takes so much work to find sparse mental health resources. In Denver, where there are many more options, liaisons take a “lighter touch,” Turner said.
Liaisons provide regular, neutral reports to the defense attorneys, prosecutors and judges on their cases about the defendants, what resources are available to the defendants and whether defendants are participating in available services.
“We give the courts and attorneys information about the behavioral health needs of the individual,” Turner said. “So the court’s decision-making goes from a narrow lens to a broader lens; they might have more solutions at their fingertips.”
If defendants opt out of the resources they are connected to, liaisons will also report that back to the courts, Turner said.
“We will let the courts know, ‘Hey that person isn’t in that housing placement anymore,’ ” she said. “Typically the court will set a hearing pretty soon after that, and then everybody is involved. And hopefully the participant shows up, but sometimes they don’t, because they might have disengaged from everything.”
The Bridges program is only a few years old in Colorado and has been heralded as a pioneering approach to the oft-fraught intersection of mental health care and the justice system.
“Bridges is one of the most promising things we have going,” said Vincent Atchity, president and CEO of Mental Health Colorado. “But this is really difficult work, so it should also come as no surprise that it is not always going to work.”
A Bridges liaison was appointed to Caudill’s cases in September.
The liaison filed three reports to the court between September and November, and, in early November, a Denver County Court judge adjusted Caudill’s bonds to personal recognizance bonds. Instead of requiring Caudill to pay a few hundred dollars to be released, he was set free without paying any money.
Caudill was released from the Denver jail on Nov. 8. Typically, Bridges liaisons in Denver meet defendants as they are released from jail, Turner said. She declined to comment on Caudill’s case.
Caudill quickly went dark, court records show. He missed his next court appearance, and a judge issued a warrant for his arrest on Dec. 20.
The warrant in the misdemeanor cases was still active when Caudill allegedly stabbed four people along the 16th Street Mall 22 days later.
“It’s one of those hard heartbreaking realities of everyone giving their very best to a situation and it still had a horrible outcome,” Turner said.
No perfect solution
Critics focused on Caudill’s personal recognizance bonds in the wake of the attack, arguing he shouldn’t have been free with four pending misdemeanor cases. A heckler at Mayor Mike Johnston’s Jan. 13 press conference — where the mayor repeatedly said the 16th Street Mall was safe — blamed the stabbings on “crime-loving Democrats.”
But Caudil’s case shows a more complex reality, experts said.
“In a free society, you can’t preemptively lock someone up because of what they might do,” said Reiskin, of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition. “You just can’t.”
Judges must keep a long list of factors in mind when deciding whether to grant bail to defendants who are jailed but not convicted of any crimes. But the primary two concerns are whether defendants will return to court once released and whether they present a danger to others if released, said Stan Garnett, former Boulder County district attorney.
It’s a constant challenge for judges to walk that line, and sometimes they get it wrong, he said.
“We certainly haven’t gotten a perfect solution,” Garnett said. “If you have someone who is dangerous, you need to hold them in custody. Usually people being held on misdemeanors are not considered dangerous — and I think that’s what happened here.”
Still, he said, there were warning signs, like the 2021 threat with a knife. But Caudill’s mental illness also complicated the case.
The U.S. court system is not fundamentally designed to recognize the impact of mental illness on behavior, Atchity said.
“If you are stealing a purse or not having good civil impulse control and it is associated with your unmanaged schizophrenia, if you are hearing things or delusional or out of touch with reality… we should want to be, as a society, fully cognizant of what the circumstances of a person’s behavior are, and then take whatever steps are in our toolkit to address and correct those behaviors. And we just don’t,” Atchity said. “Someone is only being processed through a system based on a behavior: this is an assault. So we are processing this as an assault, and there is very little consideration of all of the elements of the person’s condition that may have made them assaultive.”
The state has one of the lowest-funded behavioral and mental health systems in the nation, Turner said. People often hit the criminal justice system after they are failed by the state’s behavioral health system, she added.
Earlier and better mental health care can prevent people with mental illness from being entangled in the justice system at all, Atchity said.
“As a rule, people don’t get better through their criminalization experience, they get worse,” he said. “Once people are institutionalized and criminalized in that way, their pathway degenerates in terms of their health conditions and ability to be integrated with the community successfully. And the evidence of that is just astronomical.
“So why do we keep repeating ourselves?”
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