Small-town Colorado newspapers stolen after running story about rape charges at police chief’s house
Nearly all copies of a small-town Colorado newspaper were stolen from newspaper racks on the same day the Ouray County Plaindealer published a story about rape charges that allegedly occurred at an underage drinking party at the police chief’s home while the chief was lying down to sleep, the owner and publisher said Friday.
Mike Wiggins vowed to get to the bottom of it, posting Thursday on X, formerly Twitter: “If you were hoping to silence or intimidate us, you have failed miserably. We will find out who did this. And a new press round is just around the corner.”
The newspaper posted the story on social media and removed the paywall from its website so people could read about the sexual assault charges filed against three men, including a relative of the police chief, for actions that allegedly occurred at a party in May 2023 in Ouray where drugs were used. and alcohol were used, court records show. The suspects were 17, 18 and 19 years old at the time, and the person who reported the rapes was 17, the documents said.
By Thursday evening, someone had returned a garbage bag full of newspapers to the Plaindealer, and supporters had donated about $2,000 to the paper, something Wiggins called “extremely encouraging and humbling.”
About 250 newspapers filled the shelves Friday morning in Ouray County, a mountainous area in southwestern Colorado where about 5,000 people live.
βIf anyone tried to keep the public from reading this story, we would make sure we countered that,β Wiggins said.
The Ouray County Plaindealer is published on Thursday and delivered to shelves late Wednesday. Subscribers receive the newspaper by post.
The rack price for the weekly newspaper is $1, so someone spent $12 opening the racks and removing all the newspapers, Wiggins said. At a coffee shop they missed one newspaper rack, resulting in approximately 200 newspapers being stolen. Wiggins was pleased that the racks themselves were not damaged.
He believed that the person who returned the newspapers was the one who received them and that only one person was involved in the theft. Wiggins declined to identify the person, but he did report that information to police. Officers also had surveillance footage of some of the thefts, Wiggins said.
Ouray Police Chief Jeff Wood did not return a telephone message from The Associated Press seeking comment Friday.
The newspaper plans to run a story in next Thursday’s edition about the theft of the papers and possibly a column explaining why they took the paper so seriously and reprinted it, Wiggins said.
βIt’s strange to write about ourselves,β Wiggins said. βWe work very hard to make sure we are not the story.β
Mike Wiggins and his wife, Erin McIntyre, have owned and published the newspaper for nearly five years. The only time something similar happened was about three years ago, when McIntyre wrote about a local campground that ignored lodging restrictions imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Someone taped off the coin slot of the newspaper rack at the campsite and covered the Plexiglas window with a sign asking for the rack to be removed, he said.