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An Urban Explorer Gone

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While Mike made his frantic calls, Adam decided to climb down into the shaft. They didn't have a flashlight; they hadn't thought they'd need one. Adam made it down one level, then another. The shaft went farther. Five feet below basement grade, thirty feet down, he finally reached the bottom and stepped into water that came up to his shins. He felt around and found Johnny. His friend was still breathing. Adam remembers that the water smelled grimy, like corrosion and stale air.

Adam is thin and bookish and looks younger than his 24 years. One of his first memories of Johnny is the time that Johnny helped him make soup. They didn't live together then; Adam had just joined a mutual friend over at Johnny's house for dinner and offered to help. Johnny seemed to know what he was doing — he'd taken cooking classes — so Adam asked for instructions. How big should he cut the carrots? What about the potatoes? Spices?

"I don't know, man," Johnny had answered. "Do it however you want."

But he didn't say it like he didn't care how Adam made the soup. He said it like it was more important that Adam do the soup his own way, whatever way that was. Adam had never thought of it like that.

"I felt that same kind of push from him," Adam says now. "I saw him encouraging people and myself and everybody else to do what they wanted to do and not worry about what people told them. Just follow whatever you think is right."

Johnny was like that about everything. Last year, after seeing some tap dancers at Boulder's Dinner Theatre, he'd asked his sisters to get him lessons for Christmas. But when he showed up at the Arvada Center in his brand-new tap shoes, he was the only student who wasn't a girl under the age of ten. His sisters suspect there may have been a class recital, but he refused to clue them in on the date and time.

Johnny's interests were nothing if not eclectic. He convinced his father, Larry Polzin, to take accordion classes with him. He practiced making funny faces in the mirror the way others lift weights. He served on his college's student election commission. For birthday gifts, he wrote letters that methodically detailed what he viewed as the recipient's talents and unique qualities. He volunteered at the Denver Botanic Gardens and gave tours of the fauna and flora, sharing Latin names, geographic origins, all of it.

His parents were planning a move to Seattle in January. Johnny was going to move there, too, and get his master's in botany while working with his father in a new business creating gold-leaf plaques. He wanted to own a small farm, grow organic vegetables and save the world.

But in the blackness of the shaft, everything had changed.

Adam isn't sure how long they waited. Ten minutes? Twenty? Then the Denver Fire Department arrived, and the Engine 11 team put its ground ladder down the shaft to provide access for rescuers. The basement elevator door was pried open so that Johnny could be removed safely.

A body with less of a he-man physique might never have survived such a fall, and even so, Johnny's injuries were bad: broken bones, internal injuries. He drifted in and out of consciousness. Up top, local TV camera crews had already arrived. Mike and Adam refused to speak with reporters.

They did speak with Denver Police Department sergeant David Williams. The factory is part of Williams's sub-district in District 4, and he is quite familiar with the different types of people that Gates attracts. Since 2003, when the factory officially closed, police have been dispatched to the property at least twelve times on burglary reports, and nearly a dozen more on calls about trespassers or unwanted persons in the building.

But Williams doesn't believe the three friends had nefarious intentions.

"In my heart at the time, I don't think they were in there to get copper," he says. "They were college students and they had heard through the grapevine that it's kind of neat to explore. That was their story, and I believe it."

It was a different situation in April 2006, when Williams and other officers took on an organized gang of as many as twenty copper thieves looking to strip anything they could out of the buildings to sell to the scrap yards. Usually they'd use the money they got to feed a meth habit, Williams says. Seven people were arrested immediately, but because the remaining suspects were spread out over multiple levels, officers called in the K-9 unit.

"When you get into the sub-basements, it's pitch black," he explains. "It's an old factory. It's a dangerous environment."

So dangerous that one of the police dogs was overcome by chemical fumes. Another crawled beneath a machine and fell into a pit filled with debris and fluid. "His handler crawled under the machine and tried to grab the dog. I held the handler's legs so he wouldn't fall in," Williams remembers. "And we pulled the dog out finally."

The dogs were taken to a veterinarian for treatment and are now back in service. One of the men arrested in that sweep, 48-year-old Robert Bordas, was later sentenced to four years in prison.

Ferd Belz, president of Cherokee Denver, says that break-ins have been a huge problem for the company. "We have a constant program where somebody breaks a fence, we come back in and rechain it," he explains. "In some places, we literally welded doors shut, and then people come in and break through welded doors. So it's just a constant, ongoing effort."

The sheer size of the site, coupled with the archaic design of some of the buildings, offers any number of permeable spots where trespassers can find entry. During the day, Belz says, the company relies on asbestos-removal workers and other employees to keep an eye on the property. At night it contracts with a security company to do patrols and "close things back up," he adds. "We've done everything that the police and insurance companies have advised us as far as posting it and making sure that things are sealed up."

Louis Adams would disagree.

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