Monica LaSalle, Nederland.   That morning was the start of a seemingly peaceful fall day. There was a chill in the air, causing people to bustle about town doing their business in a more rushed fashion. School buses taking off on their routes, commuters waiting at the bus stop to make trips down the mountain for work or school, work trucks passing through town on the way to their next job site. Coffee shops and restaurants were merrily serving up coffee and breakfast, the B&F grocery store was peeking out at the sunrise with the sleepy eyes of big front windows as they open their doors to the community and its needs.

Parents pull into the Caribou Shopping Center with kids strapped into car seats and booster seats and make their way across to the Wild Bear Nature and Science Center. Police officer Det. Darragh O’Nuallain arrives to work, parking in the lot to run into the office quickly before going to pick up his squad car. He picks up what he thought was just one more in a long line of random backpacks left behind in the lot overnight. Birds chirping, locals hailing morning salutations to him, he leaves the bag in the office and takes off to get his patrol vehicle and a cup of coffee to start his day.

Upon return, he walks in and remembers the bag. He picks it up, he opens it, and in that brief moment his life changed forever.

Thanks to the quick thinking of this Nederland officer, the lives of his coworkers arriving to work shortly after him, the teachers and children down the way from the station in the nature and science center, the practitioners and patients upstairs in Columbine Family Health Center, the service industry workers in the restaurants upstairs, the staff at the B&F grocery store and liquor store, morning yoga patrons, coffee shop employees and patrons…I could go on and on listing the people that Det. O’Nuallain saved that day.

The fast actions that he and his coworkers implemented immediately upon the realization of what they were dealing with saved still further loved ones, brothers and sisters, neighbors, parents and friends, whose lives were unknowingly put in imminent danger.

Risking their lives to secure the perimeter, they worked tirelessly alongside Ned fire and many volunteers while awaiting back up from neighboring communities who sent bomb squads and emergency personnel to support and resolve the situation. Businesses sent food and water, coffee and other supplies to support them while they worked with FBI to figure out where the perpetrator of this heinous crime had gone to, if indeed he had left the scene of the crime. Residents stood by watching a robot brought up with the bomb squad as it slowly approached the doorway of the police station to pick up the backpack and deliver it to the center of the parking lot. It seemed an agonizingly slow process for the community that was left wondering what was going on from the shadow of blissful ignorance before the true nature of the situation was finally exposed.

In trial last fall, bomb experts revealed that anyone within 75 feet of the weapon of mass destruction would have been seriously injured, if not killed. Last Friday was the sentencing where Judge Christine Arguello again referred to the fortuitousness that the bomb did not go off. Despite defense insisting that David Michael Ansberry had only intended to make a statement and did not willfully try to hurt anyone or any property, the judge found enough evidence to try Ansberry as a terrorist.

Due to journal entries from before the incident detailing his time visiting Nederland and the Pioneer Inn during August of 2016 and a conversation he had with a waitress at the time as well as the intense effort put forth by Ansberry to research designing the bomb and finding a place to view the crime, his actions were deemed an act of terrorism intending to retaliate against the Nederland Police Department for the unlawful and unjustifiable killing of his good friend “Deputy Dog” Guy Gaughnor as committed by 1971 Town Marshal Renner Forbes.

That summer, Gaughnor was a 19-year-old that had left his parents’ home in the West Minneapolis suburbs after dropping out of high school and ducking the draft. He camped with other members of the STP or Serenity, Tranquility and Peace Family in the mountains west of Boulder and outside of Nederland, was arrested 12 times in Nederland for causing trouble such as drunk and disorderly conduct, panhandling and theft.

Forbes, 42, was fresh out of the Air Force after growing up on a Kansas farm and had the physical strength and stamina to back it all up. He was known by some in Nederland to be a bully as reported in 1997 by then PI proprietor Peder Lund, who also reported that the marshal had ordered Gaughnor to “get out of town or he would be a sorry lad.”

The night of July 17, Forbes was called to the Pioneer Inn on a report that once again, Gaughnor was causing trouble. He put him and his dog, Bear, in the back of his patrol car and no one ever saw Guy Gaughnor again. When his body was found a month later in Virginia Canyon, a known hunting spot regularly used by Forbes, suspicions arose to the point that Forbes reported to a Boulder County officer that he had taken Gaughnor out of the county and stated that “it would take Deputy a long time to find his way back.” Still later, he advised another Boulder County officer that to deal with the “hippy” problem, “you ought to shoot the bastards. There are plenty of places in these mountains. You could dump the bodies, and nobody would be the wiser.”

Shortly thereafter, Forbes pled guilty to and was convicted of misdemeanor assault charges after a fight and lost his commission as Marshal from the Boulder County Sheriff. He returned to his home town in Kansas where he spent the next 25 years running his mother’s farm.

Years later, a Boulder County Sheriff’s officer was touring a nursing home near Denver looking for a home for his elderly mother when he came across a door with the name Renner LeRoy Forbes. Prompted to reopen the case, they eventually showed Forbes a picture of Guy Gaughnor that brought Forbes to a deathbed breakdown and confession that included regret and a wish to trade 10 years of his own life to undo the heinous act.

On Friday, January 25, 2019, David Michael Ansberry showed no remorse for his potentially devastating attempt at revenge for Deputy Dawg and his closing statement detailed an angry and merciless thought process that equated the murder to dropping the hydrogen bomb on Hiroshima, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and atomic terrorism in general. Indicating it all played a big role in shaping who he became as an adult, he expressed outrage that if the American public is either willfully ignorant to what he referred to as numerous weekly acts of violence and killing of minorities and fringe society citizens in our country as committed by law enforcement, or tolerance of said behavior, it is an outrage causing him to fear for the future of the country. He claimed his act was not just for his friend, but for “all who were denied justice.”

Ansberry was sentenced to 324 months of prison with 5 years of subsequent parole, mandatory substance abuse treatment and cognitive behavioral therapy treatment. At the time of sentencing, Ansberry is 66 years old. Hopefully, the sentencing will help many Nederland residents and those directly affected by the ordeal to begin the path toward recovery and healing. One thing can certainly be said: where violence is atoned for with violence, no one wins.

(Originally published in the January 31, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)