The trial of a man charged with murdering three homeless people living near Interstate 25 in south Denver will center on debts: whether the victims owed $200 to a Civic Center Park drug dealer or whether they crossed a line with an organized crime ring they may have belonged to.
Attorneys for both sides outlined their cases Wednesday morning in the trial of Maurice Butler, who faces three first-degree murder charges in connection to the Aug. 9 killings. Police found the bodies of 28-year-old Nicole Boston, 39-year-old Jerome Coronado and 45-year-old Christopher Zamudio later that morning behind an abandoned building near Interstate 25 and South Broadway, where they had been living. All three died of multiple gunshots to the head.
The killings prompted Denver police to increase their outreach to the homeless community and shelters worked to connect people who knew the victims to counseling services. Fear spread in the homeless community as police searched for a suspect.
Denver police arrested Butler on Aug. 13 on unrelated drug charges and a parole violation. On Sept. 11, prosecutors charged Butler in connection to the triple homicide, though he had remained in jail since his earlier arrest.
Prosecutors on Wednesday painted Butler, 39, as a hardened drug dealer who hunted down Boston and Coronado because they owed him $200. Assistant District Attorney Katherine Horton said that Boston and Coronado moved from Civic Center Park, where they had been living, to the desolate corner of Broadway and Interstate 25 to escape the debt they owed Butler.
“This is a case about a debt — a debt owed and a debt paid,” she said.
Horton said that much of the prosecution’s case rests on data from a GPS ankle monitor that placed Butler at the scene of the crime just before midnight the night of the shooting, about the same time that two tipsters told police they heard gunshots.
“That GPS is what Mr. Butler can’t explain,” she said.
Butler’s defense attorney admitted that his client sold drugs to the pair and was at the site of the killings that night, but said Butler did not kill them because they already had repaid their debt. Instead, the defense team said that it was more likely that members of the Gutter Punk Crew, an organized group connected to some property crimes, committed the murders because Boston and Coronado broke the group’s rules, public defender Eric Goltz said.
Goltz said Denver police failed to investigate other people whom the victims may have owed money and cited interviews with some acquaintances of Boston and Coronado, who said the pair had already paid their debt to Butler.
Butler was expecting his first child at the time and needed the extra money to survive, Goltz said. But Butler didn’t kill the three people, he said.
“A drug dealer does not kill customers who pay for what he supplies,” Goltz said.
No other physical evidence ties Butler to the killings, Goltz said. The gun was never recovered and bullet casings did not have Butler’s fingerprints.
“There are things that are missing in this case that should be there,” Goltz said.
Butler previously has been convicted of drug possession, assault with a deadly weapon, kidnapping and robbery.
Many of the witnesses expected to be called in the trial, scheduled to last through Monday, will be friends of the victims, including members of the Gutter Punk group.
Triple homicides are generally rare in Denver, though there have been three such crimes in the past three years, including Butler’s case. In 2016, a man shot and killed three people inside a Park Hill home. In May, a man shot and killed three of his family members, including his 11-year-old granddaughter.
