On a warm evening in Rifle, Colorado, the night before the Fourth of July in 2001, tragedy struck the small community. Juan Carlos Medrano-Velasquez, a 22-year-old Hispanic male, was among four people killed in a violent rampage. The night's events began to unfold around 11:45 p.m. at a local City Market grocery store. A man named Steven Michael Stagner, a 42-year-old white male, initiated an attack that would also claim the lives of Juan Carlos's brother, 23-year-old Melquiades
Medrano-Velasquez, 44-year-old Juan Manuel Hernandez-Carrillo, and 19-year-old Angelica Toscano-Salgado, who had been in the United States for only 22 days. The violent spree also left three other men seriously wounded.
The assailant, Steven Stagner, first shot Hernandez-Carrillo, a botanist who was on a payphone outside the grocery store. He then crossed the parking lot and shot Angelica Toscano, who was talking to her mother on another payphone. From there, Stagner proceeded to the nearby Bookcliff Mobile Home Park, a place where many Latino families lived. It was here that he came across the Medrano-Velasquez brothers, who were sitting outside their trailer, and shot them. He continued his attack, wounding three more men before he was apprehended by law enforcement. The motive for the shooting was investigated as a possible hate crime, as all the victims were of Mexican nationality. One of the survivors later testified that Stagner had uttered a racial slur before shooting him.
Stagner was arrested shortly after the shootings and faced 19 felony charges, including first-degree murder and attempted murder. Despite the evidence against him, the legal proceedings took a turn that left many in the community, particularly the immigrant community, feeling that justice had not been served. Stagner pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Multiple psychiatric evaluations, including one by a renowned forensic psychiatrist who had deemed other high-profile killers sane, concluded that Stagner was insane at the time of the shootings. His family had reportedly tried to have him committed for years prior to the incident due to his long history of mental illness, which included diagnoses of schizophrenia and manic depression.
In December 2002, a judge found Steven Michael Stagner not guilty by reason of insanity. As a result, he was not sentenced to prison but was instead committed to the Colorado Mental Health Institute for a term of one day to life. The verdict was met with outrage and fear from the victims' families and members of the community, who felt that the legal system had failed to deliver justice for the four lives lost and the three others who were injured. In the years following the tragedy, a memorial bench was dedicated to honor the victims, a permanent reminder of the night that shook the town of Rifle.
