Days after a 14-year-old was shot and killed at the Montbello Recreation Center, community members met city officials at the neighborhood’s Boys and Girls Club.
City officials have long heralded recreation centers as safe spaces for young people – and despite the killing, they maintain that hasn’t changed.
“Our rec centers are still the safest places for our young people to be,” said Parks and Recreation head Jolon Clark.
Clark said the department is unsure when the Montbello Recreation Center will reopen. Staff who witnessed the shooting and responded are traumatized, and the city is working to support them.
“We're taking care of our staff right now to make sure that we first and foremost give them the supports that they need before we reopen,” Clark said.
Many details of the killing remain unclear. City officials made an arrest Friday but have declined to release more information, saying that both the suspect and the victim are minors.
Meanwhile, community members were looking for answers to an unending problem: how to keep kids from killing each other.
Anti-violence activist Joel Hodge, of Struggle of Love, blamed parents for failing to search their kids' bags and phones for information and encouraged guardians to “get nosy.”
Ben Sanders, head of the Office of Social Equity and Innovation, claimed the shooting was not a “systemic” failure. District 5 Denver Police Commander Joseph Engelbert described the incident as “isolated.”
But Councilmember Stacie Gilmore, who represents the northeast Denver neighborhood, blamed Denver Parks and Recreation, accusing the agency of failing to keep the Montbello Recreation Center safe. She argued the Mayor’s Office and the Denver Police Department were disconnected from the community.
She also blasted city officials for cutting resources to community groups and Parks and Recreation for cutting programming at the Montbello Rec Center, an accusation Parks and Rec head Jolon Clark rebutted.
The city also has cut its “youth violence prevention” line item by $500,000, even as it has invested in alternative youth violence prevention strategies.
Nobody mentioned a separate fatal shooting of an adult that happened on the sidewalk at the Denver Skatepark last week, also a Denver Parks and Recreation facility.
City cut youth-violence-prevention line item in 2026 – but the mayor says other money is paying for similar work.
Facing a budget crunch, Mayor Mike Johnston cut a line item for youth violence prevention funding from $1.17 million in 2025 to $631,027 in 2026 and moved the work from the Office of Children’s Affairs to the Office of Neighborhood Safety. Both departments saw large cuts in 2026.
The violence prevention money is used to fund community groups doing anti-violence work.
“Community has seen a huge cut,” Preston Adams, who works on youth violence prevention for the city, told Denverite in a Tuesday interview.
The mayor’s spokesperson, Jon Ewing, said that a separate Broncos Fund for youth activities more than replaced the lost city dollars.
“This funding was made possible by our City Council, which ensured that more dollars could flow to youth programming and safety through a $3 million increase in the 2026 budget,” Ewing wrote in an email. “We’re also being more intentional in how we allocate time, funding, and resources toward supporting the community in addressing youth violence.”
The remaining city funding includes $90,000 contracts with SOAR (Seeing Our Adolescents Rise), Royal Mentoring Group, Colorado Lifted, and Servicios de la Raza.
As the mayor and Denver City Council work on the 2027 budget, Adams hopes the city reinvests in the kind of work he does, he said Tuesday.
“We are doing the best we can with the resources we have,” Adams said.
The Office of Children’s Affairs, which used to handle youth violence prevention, saw among the most significant cuts in the 2026 budget – 10 layoffs, two open jobs eliminated, 37% of its full-time employees cut.
The Office of Social Equity and Innovation, which oversees the neighborhood safety program that inherited the youth violence prevention work, also saw major cuts: It lost 10 employees, two open jobs were eliminated, and 23% of its workforce was cut.
