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An Urban Explorer Gone

Continued from page 6

Word spread quickly that Johnny had died. It didn't make the papers this time, but everyone found out. People who knew him or knew of him. He was a friend, or a friend of a friend. He was family.

The Polzins scattered his ashes in Puget Sound and had a memorial bench installed in his honor at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Two months after Johnny's death, they are trying to find their way through their own labyrinth of grief. They wonder why it was that his life stalled in such a putrid place, deep in the dark where nothing could grow.

"He and I used to love going to the Gardens," says Johnny's mother, Donna. "He'd go with his friends from school. We bought a bench where we could just go and sit, in the Alpine Garden. It's better than some cemetery. He would have liked that."

They're taking another action on Johnny's behalf, too. They've hired an attorney, Jessica Allen of Isaacson & Rosenbaum, who's notified Cherokee Denver and Misers Asbestos that the family plans to sue the companies for failing to secure the area. (Misers Asbestos did not return calls; Cherokee Denver declined to comment on the accident.)

"You open the door, and five steps in, my son plummets thirty feet," says Larry Polzin. "The decision to do nothing was still a decision. They could've covered the pit, they could've chained the door, they could've welded it shut. And they did nothing."

True, Johnny went to Gates with the intent of trespassing on private property. But the legal theory behind the litigation is simple: If a property owner is aware of a hazard and does nothing to mitigate the danger, then the owner can be held responsible for injuries caused by the hazard. Johnny is gone, but others could be saved. Today, the doorway to Unit 41 is boarded up and secured. From the outside, you can't see the pit.

"It's pretty depressing, really," Joe Hicks says of Gates. "I want to go back again before it's knocked down completely." But he's also reluctant, given Helms's arrest and Johnny's death.

Talk of the old factory and what happened there fills an urban-explorers online thread. "I was gonna hit the shit out of Gates when I come for Christmas," one poster says. "Now that I read the guy died, I can also easily skip visiting it.... Falling scares the shit out of me."

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