Convicted man has support from unlikely source in Aurora youth violence prevention work 

 As the city of Aurora’s Standing Against Violence Every Day (SAVE) program is set to complete its second year, it is finding success in connecting with troubled young people and curtailing youth violence by leveraging the powerful voices of crime victims, their families and the people who committed the crimes. In at least one case, the voices have united. 

Nearly 20 years have passed since Jutte Gallegos Burton clocked into her nighttime shift at the 7-Eleven store near East Sixth Avenue and Havana Street in Aurora for the final time. 

 “There was a robbery one particular evening where, tragically, a store clerk was murdered,” said Aurora Police Commander Mike Hanifin remembering what occurred on Dec. 10, 2006. “It was a store clerk who many of our officers were familiar with. She was very pro-police and many of us knew her.” 

 Surveillance video captured images of the gunman, 23-year-old John Doubleday, who was later convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.  

 “I was in such a dark place,” Doubleday said in an interview with AuroraTV. “My son was born. I had lost my job. I didn't have any income coming in. Before you knew it, I was in a blackout state. I remember going into the store and I remember pulling the firearm. Then, I remember the shotgun breech coming apart. I remember as I was trying to close it, it going off.” 

 He said he was involved in running various drugs and illegal substances around the time. 

 “I didn’t have any, like, hope or feeling that I was ever going to see any daylight,” Doubleday said. 

 Today, he has a renewed sense of purpose thanks to a headline-grabbing successful appeal of his case to the Colorado Supreme Court in 2016 that afforded him parole. He also credits an act of grace and forgiveness. 

 “My victim’s daughter reached out to me,” Doubleday said. “I realized who I wanted to be, what I wanted to do. I wanted to apply these things that I learned to help people. And that was my purpose and calling. She ended up advocating for my release. And maybe she got a little bit of closure knowing I wasn’t going to waste this opportunity.” 

 The opportunity, in part, comes in the form of a partnership. He works with Aurora’s SAVE program as a peer mentor in furthering violence prevention work and convincing troubled young people not to choose the type of life he did at their age. 

 “Oftentimes these are individuals that have lived experience, so they can relate to our recipients like we in law enforcement certainly cannot,” Hanifin said. “They have been in those shoes and have come out on the other side and now they've committed their lives to helping others not follow that same path.” 

 SAVE focuses on identifying youth between the ages of 13 and 25 who have a high likelihood of being involved in gun violence – as a trigger puller or as a victim. The law enforcement group involved in SAVE meets weekly and uses data to track down the young people most at risk. 

 Commander Hanifin had not met Doubleday prior to his role with the SAVE program but had been involved in the efforts to arrest him in 2006. 

 “Now we sit side by side in the same vehicle every week, going out in the community and trying to prevent another young man or woman in this community from following in those same footsteps,” Hanifin said. 

 SAVE is a focused deterrence strategy and collaboration between the Aurora Police Department, the city’s Youth Violence Prevention Program and various community partners such as Hazelbrook, a recovery services provider where Doubleday first worked.  

 “Really, the aim of all that contact is to stop the violence,” said Lisa Battan, Aurora SAVE Project Manager. “[We are] really trying to give that offramp: ‘What can we do to support you in furtherance of your goals?’ Maybe it's a job or education development. Maybe it is mental health services because they experienced so much trauma. Maybe it's substance misuse, recovery services or even peer mentorship. Sometimes that can be so crucial.” 

Doubleday said his work is “the perfect opportunity from being part of the gun violence in the city to actually being part of the solution.” 

 AuroraTV and SAVE staff located Jutte Gallegos Burton’s daughter, Patricia Gallegos, who remains in Colorado. She is set to participate in the SAVE program to represent the voice of a victim’s family. 

 “I am very proud of John,” she said in conversations with AuroraTV. 

She confirmed her support for Doubleday’s work with the SAVE program. She said she wrote a letter to the court in 2016 advocating for his release from prison. 

 “Part of the reason that we wanted to implement this strategy – focused deterrence or group violence intervention – is that it’s been shown to be effective nationwide in reducing group and gun violence significantly, sometimes by as much as 50 percent in other cities that have adopted it,” Battan said. 

 Since September 2023, the SAVE team has identified and selected approximately 220 candidates for the program. They have an average age of 18. To date, in its short time, the SAVE program has successfully connected with approximately 83 percent of the young people it identified. 

 “The traditional police response to gun crime is arrest and incarceration focused,” Hanifin said. “This strategy recognizes that arrest and incarceration alone is not going to solve the problem. In order to reduce crime – and not just displace it – we have to take an intervention and prevention approach so that people can have more options in life than they currently do, and that’s where that concrete offer of community support and services for an individual and families is critical.” 

To learn more about the SAVE program, visit auroragov.org/save. 

Questions about Aurora SAVE can be directed to AuroraSAVE@auroragov.org.