Features

More people are dying every year in Jefferson County because of prescription-drug overdoses, a trend mirroring national statistics that the coroner’s office attributes to increased prescribing of opiate painkillers.

By year’s end, the office predicts, 45 residents will die from unintentional drug toxicity. And though 2010 saw a slight drop in prescription-drug deaths, the anticipated number for 2011 would represent a 73 percent rise over those of 2005.

South Jeffco resident Dean Hinds had a nostalgic surprise waiting for him when he sat down for breakfast on Veterans Day at MorningStar Senior Living — a wasp-waisted, dark-green Army jacket, a relic he had not seen since tucking it away in a trunk when he returned home from Germany after World War II.

His son in law, Bob Jones, had discovered the jacket in his home just days before, and was eager to reunite the garment with its owner.

The odds were stacked against Lesley Ingram.

The 29-year-old, addicted to crystal meth and alcohol, faced a handful of serious charges in Jefferson County’s 1st Judicial District.

Ingram, unemployed and without prospects, was nonetheless given an unexpected second chance — a transfer to the newly established Jefferson County Recovery Court, a program designed to help struggling addicts overcome abusive habits and give back to the community.

It’s a Friday afternoon at B’nai Chaim, and Rabbi Joel Schwartzman is running between the building’s two floors, trying to reconcile temperatures between the freezing ground level and the balmy basement.

In about two hours, 200 congregants would pack the small Reform Judaism synagogue for a night of musical devotion, a treat Schwartzman and his wife, Ziva, provided a few weeks before his July 2 retirement.

Prom was different this year for Chatfield High School junior Hally Burns.

Dressed to the nines and meticulously groomed, Hally arrived at the dance looking as glamorous as a trendsetting musician attending the Grammy Awards.

“We’re going to make her like Taylor Swift tonight,” said stylist Shauna Morris, as she ironed Hally’s hair into thick strands of loose curls. “That is who she picked out.”

Just as the metro area’s weather took a dramatic turn last weekend, shifting from highs above 80 on Saturday to a snowstorm the following morning, far stranger things were happening on Neptune.

The planet, for example, may have been experiencing a rainstorm — with liquid methane precipitating in beach-ball-size drops.

And nearby, on Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, the entire atmosphere over one hemisphere may have been frozen to the surface during an unimaginably cold winter.

A week of life is missing from Marcus Uribe’s memory.

The Columbine High School graduate awoke last November in a hospital bed at the University of Texas, a machine controlling his breathing via a tube in his throat.

The Marine, burly from a weight-training regimen, struggled to free himself upon regaining consciousness, an early show of hope that he might recover from the brain injury he sustained when he was run over by a speeding truck days before.

He was a hero — or so people tell him.

Clarinet cases and water bottles are scattered haphazardly in the outfield grass on Chatfield High School’s baseball field. More than 100 students, most wearing shorts, stand at attention, waiting for cues from the marching band’s drum majors.

It’s a Saturday — homecoming day — and the band members have been rehearsing since 8 a.m. They get their first substantial break at 11:15. Fifteen minutes later, they’re back in formation.

Blasts of distorted electric-guitar chords compounded with a capricious flow of drums and cymbal crashes on Sept. 18 as the Summerset Festival audience absorbed the hard-rock performance of local student band Chapter 4. A teenage crowd edged up against the stage, transforming a small section of grass in Clement Park into a mosh pit, pushing and laughing as they bounced off of one another.