The Strange Story of Christian Paetsch or The Bee Keeper, the Police Chief and "Investigative Detention"

by Scott Creighton

It’s June 2nd 2012 and a bright sunny day in Aurora Colorado. Forty people are surrounded by cops with shotguns drawn at the intersection of  E. Iliff Avenue and S. Buckley Road, they’re handcuffed and sitting in the hot sun on the pavement while the police and the FBI’s Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force search everyone’s car, one by one.

Children are being reassured by their cuffed parents that mommy or daddy didn’t do anything wrong while some uniformed stranger rummages through their possessions in the back seat of the family car. Appointments are missed, people are inconvenienced, and the police chief in the end claims that the ends did justify the means because he got his man.

Aurora police Chief Dan Oates, who would later gain much more publicity, claims that what they did was called an “investigative detention” and that it was justified to catch a very dangerous bank robber, former music teacher and community theater thespian, Christian Paetsch, who dressed up in a bee keeper’s outfit and robbed a local Wells Fargo at gun point just a little while earlier.

According to the story, Paetsch robbed the bank taking $25,000 in cash and a GPS tracking device along with him.

He left the bank on a bicycle.  A 45 year old music teacher, in the hot Colorado sun, dressed in a bee keeper’s outfit, lugging 25 grand in a bag, carrying a gun,  peddled down the street in broad daylight. Any questions?

Let’s forget for a second that Wells Fargo laundered $380,000,000,000 in Sinaloa drug cartel money from 2004-2008 and no one was arrested for that one.  Also forget that Wells Fargo has been found to be guilty of committing massive levels of lender fraud and foreclosure fraud over the past decade causing untold damage to the entire country. Just forget that as well.

Let’s just focus on the little 25 grand that the 45 year old music teacher took while wearing a bee keeper’s outfit.

Chief Oates claims that they had to detain them right there at that intersection because the armed suspect was extremely dangerous and desperate.

Well, if that was the case, did Chief Oates really think that backing him into a corner like that surrounded by a bunch of civilians was a good idea? Why didn’t they simply follow the GPS till the guy was in a parking lot (with empty cars) or driving down a two lane road where he could be easily blocked off with no one else involved? Why didn’t Chief Oates simply follow the guy to his home and send in the tactical guys? For that matter, why didn’t they just let him go and tell Wells Fargo the money was an asshole tax for flooding the streets with coke and crack and for illegally foreclosing on his resident’s homes?

If he thought this guy was so dangerous, why would the chief of police put so many people at risk like that to take this guy down while he still had the GPS in his vehicle and they could have tracked him to a much less densely populated area?

Turns out he had two handguns in his car and it’s yet to be determined if they were even loaded (the ABC News photo shows them unloaded)

You know where this hardened dangerous criminal is now? He’s at home, playing his violin and thinking of which plays he will produce first in the Big House.

Yep, they released him on bond after being in jail about 8 days from what I can tell. That’s how dangerous the guy is. Funny thing is, he was hard up enough to go out and rob a bank, but somehow he comes up with bail money?

At the end of today’s hearing, Judge Karen Mix agreed to let Paetsch, who has been jailed since his arrest Saturday, go free on bond. Mix said Paetsch would be required to undergo a mental health exam and be confined to his home pending trial.” Aurora Sentinel

If this entire story seems pretty absurd to you, just remember two little words that seems to make it all make sense: investigative detention.

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