Steven Wicks, a 10-year-old White male, spent the early afternoon of March 8, 1980 with his friend Ronald DeFond, 7, leaving for a short walk to buy ice cream from a grocery at East Colfax Avenue and Williams Street in Denver. They never returned. Later that day, a passerby in neighboring Adams County came upon a field off Tower Road near Aurora and found the boys lying side by side, a discovery that would draw investigators from the Adams County Sheriff’s Office and mark the beginning of a case that remains unresolved.
Evidence at the scene and subsequent reports established that both children had been shot; accounts describe each boy sustaining a single gunshot to the head, with both later pronounced dead at Denver’s public hospital. The secluded stretch near Tower Road—reported as south of East 56th Avenue—offered few immediate leads, and the suddenness of the violence left little in the way of explanation for how the boys were taken and killed so quickly after leaving home.
In the days that followed, the community mourned the loss. Photographs from March 14, 1980 show the children’s caskets leaving Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church in northeast Denver en route to Mount Olivet Cemetery in Jefferson County, where the companions were buried side by side. Official cold-case listings would later record Steven’s homicide in the city of Aurora within Adams County, underscoring the cross-jurisdictional footprint of the day’s events.
No arrests have been recorded in Steven Wicks’s killing. Over the years, investigators indicated they had a prime suspect who died several years ago, yet the case has not been formally closed and the Adams County Sheriff’s Office continues to seek information from the public. The Colorado Cold Case Database maintains entries for both boys, keeping the essential details accessible in hopes a lead might still surface.
