The longer your prison sentence, the more chains you wear.
So Joshua Rosales, sentenced to life in prison, had them all: ankle shackles, a belly chain, handcuffs. On the occasions when he was transferred from one Colorado prison to another, he sat chained up in the back of the bus.
The prisoners being released sat up front, usually in khakis and blue shirts, unchained. On the way from one prison to another, the bus sometimes stopped at a parole office in Westminster, and those newly-freed men stepped off.
Rosales remembers watching them go, despair mixed with tiny, lingering hope.
“There were times and I was like, ‘(Expletive) it, I never had that chance,’ but then there were also times I’m like, ‘I’m gonna do that, watch,’ ” he said. “‘I’m gonna be there one of these days.’ I believed it, in my heart. But I also expected I might never get out. I had to accept that fact.”
Legally, Rosales’ case was over. He was convicted of felony murder in 2007 — jurors found he was present during a man’s murder at a Denver motel, but he didn’t pull the trigger. Back then, felony murder carried the same penalty as first-degree murder.
Rosales was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole at the age of 23.
In prison, he watched his daughters, toddlers when he went in, grow into young women. His appeals were denied. Years passed. Then, in 2021, state lawmakers re-classified felony murder from first-degree murder to second-degree murder: people convicted of felony murder after September 2021 could not be sentenced to more than 48 years in prison. Lawmakers who supported the reform felt that lower sentence was more fair than life in prison for people who didn’t actually kill anyone.
The new law didn’t apply to Rosales. But it opened a door.
Though it was under no legal obligation to do so, the Denver District Attorney’s Office agreed to review Rosales’ case through its brand-new Conviction Review Unit, created in 2022 amid a surge of such units nationwide. The unit reviews cases in which defendants say they are innocent, as well as those in which defendants say they were punished too harshly under prior sentencing rules.
Rosales’ case was the first in which Denver prosecutors agreed to seek a reduced sentence, putting him into a small but growing group of people who are getting out of prison in the wake of wider criminal justice reform that followed the nationwide protests against police brutality in 2020. The Denver DA’s Conviction Review Unit has reduced 11 sentences so far, spokesman Matt Jablow said.
Denver prosecutors declined to speak with The Denver Post for this story. Jablow said in a statement that then-District Attorney Beth McCann agreed to reduce Rosales’ sentence because of his age at the time of the crime, his rehabilitative efforts in prison and the 2021 change to state law lowering the penalty for felony murder.
In 2023, prosecutors moved to dismiss the felony murder conviction and related counts against Rosales. He instead pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. His life sentence was wiped away, and he was re-sentenced to 32 years in prison. He was soon eligible for parole.
“I got out on a miracle,” Rosales, 41, said.
He was released to a halfway house in July after spending more than 19 years in custody. In January, he left the halfway house to start five years of parole, riding with his cousin straight from the facility to that parole office in Westminster.
He met his parole officer for the first time, and, afterward, he stood outside the office chatting with his cousin. Then, a prison van rolled up. Newly freed inmates walked off, carrying their belongings over their shoulders in clear plastic bags.
Rosales rushed to give one man his business card.
He can help, he told the man. He’s been there.
And, he says, he’s never going back.
“What we had to do to survive”
Damian Ornelas burglarized his first house when he was 6.
He climbed through a basement window with his cousin, Rosales, who was a few years his senior but still couldn’t have been older than 10 or 11, Ornelas remembered. They grabbed what they could, then sold the stolen stuff to adults in their Montbello neighborhood.
The adults would pay cash and sometimes put in orders: Was there a VCR down there? Can you get a stereo?
The boys spent the money on food and clothes. Sometimes they waited for police to raid a house and take everyone out in handcuffs before going in to steal what they could. Sometimes they shoplifted or broke into cars. Sometimes they stole the car, drove it to a fast-food drive-thru. Ornelas remembers going to the grocery store with his dad and walking out with a cartful of unpaid merchandise.
Ornelas lived with Rosales and Rosales’ brothers after his parents split. Rosales’ mom did the best she could raising her three sons — and whoever else was around, her house was always open to anyone in need — but it wasn’t enough. She was addicted to cocaine, court records show, and the boys often went without.
Without electricity, without heat, without food.
She went on weeks-long benders, and the boys were left on their own. When she was hospitalized for a month after a car accident, no one in the family checked in on Rosales or told the boys what was going on. It was just another of her long absences.
“We did what we had to do to survive as kids,” Ornelas said.
Violence surrounded the family in Montbello. Rosales’ brother watched someone get shot and killed in front of him, court records show. In 1997, a few days before Rosales’ 14th birthday, an 8-year-old boy was shot as he played Nintendo in the family’s basement, wounded when several kids were handling a gun and it fired. Neither Rosales nor Ornelas were there at the time.
“Looking back, it’s not normal — but it was our normal,” Rosales said. He was in and out of juvenile detention from the time he was 11, but mostly in. It was calmer inside. Three meals a day, no matter what. He earned his GED there.
When he got out at 17, he started selling drugs.
“I’m not proud of this, but growing up, I didn’t want to be a cop or a fireman,” Rosales said. “I wanted to be a drug dealer. That’s what I knew, you know? Now, as a man, that sounds stupid. But at the time, it’s what we glamorized and glorified.”
He was robbed and shot in the stomach when he was 18 or 19. In 2004, a few months before the murder, he was beaten with a metal baseball bat, cracking his skull and injuring his brain. He stuttered for a year after that.
And then came the murder.
A motel murder
On May 20, 2005, Rosales, then 21, and his friend, Marty Salazar, 37, went to a Days Inn motel in Denver for what Rosales said he thought was a drug deal.
When they arrived, they met with Jesus Gamboa, the dealer. But the exchange quickly soured, turning from a drug deal into a robbery into a homicide. Gamboa owed money to Salazar and a friend of Salazar’s, and Salazar wanted to take that debt off the bill for the drugs, Rosales said.
Gamboa refused, and an argument about the debt escalated into a fight, Rosales said. Gamboa pulled a gun, and he and Rosales wrestled over it. During the fight, Rosales bit Gamboa in the arm.
As Rosales and Gamboa fought, Salazar shot Gamboa five times. One bullet went through Gamboa’s arm and into his heart. The man died on top of Rosales. An autopsy later showed a “significant dose” of methamphetamine in Gamboa’s body, court records show.
Rosales remembers shoving the man’s body off of him.
“We leave, we don’t speak of it, at all,” Rosales said.
Abundant evidence tied him to the scene, and he was later arrested and charged with first-degree murder in Gamboa’s death. Salazar was killed in a shootout with Greeley police later that year.
Rosales early on refused a plea offer from the prosecution.
“At this time, at 21, I’m like, ‘I didn’t kill him, I didn’t do it, I don’t deserve to be in prison,’ ” he said. “I meant that; I stuck to that. Even though by law I’m guilty of felony murder. I was 21 years old, you couldn’t tell me that… You think you’re invincible.”
During the jury trial, prosecutors presented a witness who testified that Salazar and Rosales had gone to the hotel room intending to rob Gamboa, to steal his truck as collateral for the outstanding debt. The fight started when Gamboa refused to give up the keys, the witness testified. Prosecutors argued that Gamboa died during a robbery — not a drug deal — and that constituted felony murder.
Rosales maintains he went to the motel for a drug deal, and noted that nothing was taken from Gamboa.
Prosecutors can bring a felony murder charge against a defendant if the victim died during the commission of one of several specific crimes that the defendant participated in, even if the defendant didn’t actually kill the victim. Those crimes include arson, burglary, robbery, kidnapping, escape and sexual assault.
The prosecution’s witness, who was not present during the killing, had been charged with first-degree murder as well, but prosecutors dropped that charge to a single count of accessory after the fact in exchange for her testimony. That lower charge carries a typical sentence of two to six years in prison.
Rosales was convicted of felony murder, conspiracy to commit aggravated robbery and attempted aggravated robbery. Jurors could not reach a verdict on the first-degree murder charge — it was disputed during the jury trial whether Rosales or Salazar pulled the trigger — and prosecutors later dismissed that count.
“Although the prosecution alleged that Mr. Rosales committed murder after deliberation and with intent, the jury did not agree,” Rosales’ petition for post-conviction relief reads.
Rosales didn’t cry when the guilty verdict came back. He was numb.
“It was like an out-of-body experience,” he said. “It just didn’t feel real.”
Almost two decades behind bars
For the first decade in prison, Rosales just tried to live. He thought about the murder and the outside world as little as possible.
“You forget about it, because it’s easier to accept,” he said of the outside world. “You don’t dwell on it, because it’ll make your time harder. It’s kind of like an illusion.”
If a commercial came on the prison TV for a burger, he’d flip past it without a thought.
“Because I knew I could never have one,” he said. “So I never cared. It had zero effect on me.”
He was usually in a good mood, joking and laughing. Fellow prisoners told him he was in denial, that it hadn’t hit him yet. He’d tell them they were wrong.
“I’m like, ‘I’m not in denial, I’m not dumb. But I’m doing life no matter what. So why would I be miserable? I’m gonna make the best of it,’ ” he said.
Over the years, he covered his body in prison tattoos, making the ink by burning tissues soaked in Vaseline or baby oil under a metal mattress, then scraping the black soot from the metal. The tattooer then used a spring, perhaps pulled from a pen, to dab the soot into his skin. Rosales got the Mercedes logo tattooed on his left knee and the Cadillac logo on his right — his two dream cars.
His daughters, Prosperity Carlson and Aziriah Rosales, visited somewhat regularly in the beginning. When they were young, the correctional officers would let them sit on their dad’s lap and hug, Aziriah Rosales said.
Rosales did what he could to be a dad from prison, the sisters said. He’d pay for dresses for school dances and send cards and letters. He’d call, though if they missed it, they might not connect again for weeks.
Visiting got harder as they grew into middle-schoolers. The correctional officers stopped letting them hug as much, or even touch hands across the table, Aziriah Rosales said. She wasn’t allowed to wear tight jeans. The correctional officers watched their every move.
“I’m like, I’m literally a child,” Aziriah Rosales said.
She also started to understand then that her father was never coming home, she said. Leaving him in prison after a visit was hard. And sometimes he’d try to father her, to set a rule about a sleepover or some such thing, and she felt like he didn’t get a say.
For Carlson, the prison visits were so uncomfortable that she felt her relationship with her dad never grew past the surface level. She eventually stopped visiting.
“Since he wasn’t in my life day-to-day, I felt like I didn’t need him, I didn’t need that relationship,” she said. “…It just bothered me, not being able to have a full relationship. I’d rather, at the time, have had nothing than part of what I could have.”
Around the same time, after about a decade in prison, something changed for Josh Rosales. He started to reckon with Gamboa’s death. And with his lifetime prison sentence.
“I had to face it, like, ‘Man, I might never get out,’ ” he said. “But if I never get out, I want my daughters to be proud of me.”
He started taking classes, attending groups, reading books, following changes in the law. He started to accept responsibility for his role in Gamboa’s death.
“Yeah I didn’t pull the trigger, but you chose to sell drugs,” he said of himself. “You chose to be there during that thing. You knew they had guns, and you chose to be there. You’re still responsible for that (expletive). I had to accept it. And once I started accepting it, doors started opening for me.”
The effort to reform Colorado’s felony murder laws sparked new hope for him, even as attorneys warned that the new law likely wouldn’t be retroactive. He started to believe he’d get out again, to think about what he’d do with a second chance.
Rosales asked Ornelas to add his name to Ornelas’ credit card account, so he’d have good credit if he was ever released.
Ornelas did it just to appease his cousin.
“I told my wife, ‘I don’t understand why he wants this, he’s never coming home,’ ” Ornelas said. “But he was bound and determined that he was coming home — and he wants good credit.”
A new mission
For the first couple months after leaving prison, Rosales cried at the little things.
He’d be in a restaurant, or just riding in a car, then think, Damn, I’m out, and the tears would flow.
“I couldn’t stop it,” he said.
He works as a peer recovery coach for Creating Connections, a company offering counseling and peer coaching services along the Front Range. His office is decorated with prison art he collected over the years, each piece carefully framed, as well as the professional certificates he earned inside.
He supports clients by helping them find a bed in sober living homes or detox facilities, driving them to doctor appointments, holding group sessions, assisting in their job search, lending an ear — anything they need. He spends much of his time in his newly-purchased car — a 2014 Mercedes his family helped fund — driving from client to client. His phone is constantly buzzing, and he loves the work.
Rosales is focused on bettering the community, both through his job and outside of it. He hosted a toy drive before Christmas to give gifts to his clients’ children, and worked with one girl to raise money to buy blankets and supplies for Denver’s homeless residents, passing the goods out on a frigid Monday in January. He’s teaching a course he created in prison on reaching goals, holding a 90-minute class every Sunday for five weeks.
He found a two-bedroom apartment for $1,800 a month in Denver (after a property manager made an exception to the building’s policy on past felony convictions), bought a Purple-brand mattress (he spent years watching those commercials in prison) and hung art on his walls (took a week just to decorate). He drinks caramel macchiatos with six pumps of vanilla syrup.
When people wonder if he’s moving too fast, doing too much too soon after nearly two decades of institutional living, he scoffs.
“I spent years visualizing, manifesting this,” he said. “I spent years picturing me getting out and driving a nice car. I spent years picturing getting out and having my own place, somewhere where I can go and clear my head and think.”
There are challenges: technology changed. There’s a learning curve for cellphones and self-checkouts, grocery pickup and credit-card scanners. Society changed, too: In prison, people had meaningful, face-to-face conversations. Out here, everyone is in their own world. Social media exploded. There are different rules around respect and interactions with strangers.
Rosales wants to rebuild his relationship with his daughters, who are now in their 20s. They’ve started hanging out regularly: bowling, singing karaoke, visiting Dave & Busters, go-carting. They can call and text him whenever they want, a big change from the rigid communication possible when he was in prison.
One day soon after Rosales got out, he and his daughters went to a park. His daughters sat on swings, and he pushed them like they were little kids.
“At 21 and 22 years old, it’s the first time our dad got to push us on the swings,” Prosperity Carlson said. “It was honestly so much fun. And it brings out our inner child, heals our inner child.”
For the longest time, Aziriah Rosales didn’t want to get married, because her dad wouldn’t be able to walk her down the aisle. That hesitation is gone now that he is out. But still, they can’t make up the lost time, Carlson said. There’s too much.
“There are so many things that we did miss,” she said. “Our father-daughter dance — he didn’t get to be at my wedding, see me graduate. But there are so many milestones for the rest of our lives that it will make those moments that much more special.”
Rosales is ready to show that not all prisoners should be locked up forever. When he talks to prisoners still inside, they tell him to do it for them.
“They’re like, ‘Get out and do good so you can show them that we’re not all monsters in here,’ ” he said.
He’s not worried that he’ll slip up. Staying out of trouble is a responsibility he takes on with pride and confidence. He is no longer who he was at 21.
“The worst is over with, right?” he said. “I mean there are always obstacles in life, I’m not underestimating or minimizing, but no matter what happens, I’ll be all right.”
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