Jonathan and Elizabeth Stark arrived at a park outside Granby on a late-April day in 2020 to meet with Grand County’s assistant coroner and a sheriff’s investigator.
Their conversation, captured on a body-worn camera, concerned the investigation into the Feb. 18 death of their 7-year-old son, Isaiah.
The cause and circumstances of the boy’s death were deeply unusual. Isaiah died from ingesting too much sodium, the coroner found, likely due to drinking olive brine. The parents had used olives and olive brine as a form of punishment, a mandatory reporter later told a child abuse hotline. Isaiah was also malnourished at the time of his death.
The Starks are well-known in Grand County, especially in law enforcement circles, with Jonathan Stark serving as an officer in the Granby Police Department.
Ninety minutes into their conversation, then Assistant Coroner Tawnya Bailey told the parents, “I will do everything in my power to make sure this stays here,” according to a report by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. She added that the sheriff’s investigator, Bobby Rauch, would do the same.
ANALYSIS: English waste-to-energy and waste incineration expert Dr Andrew Rollinson was withering in his view on the application to build a $205 million “nationally significant” waste-to-energy in...