Crime & Punishment

COLORADO

When Anthony Lombardi Jr. was six years old he was put to bed, his heart critically weakened by rheumatic fever. For the next six years he seldom left his sickroom. Through the open window he could hear his friends playing outside on Denver's Quivas Street; sometimes, when he was propped up in bed, he could watch them. Then, at night, he made elaborate plans for all the things he would do when he got well.

The day the doctor finally let him out of bed, Anthony started making up for lost time in a hurry. Perhaps he was too fast; he was impatient with anything that stood in his way. He made some bad mistakes. The police tagged him as a delinquent. Then he stole a $30 rifle, was sent off to the Colorado Industrial School for Boys at nearby Golden. There Anthony, now 14, got in trouble again: he broke the silence rule going in to supper, offered another boy his plate because he wasn't hungry himself.

For that infraction, even though school authorities had been warned of his condition, Anthony Lombardi was stripped, tied down and beaten three times with a broad leather strap. When he complained that he was sick again, nobody believed him. But last week he was under an oxygen tent in Colorado General Hospital.

Denver papers spread the story on Page One. Soon other tales of brutality came to light. A former state employe charged that a guard's kick had caused the death of another Golden boy last spring. There were stories of beatings, dark cells, bread-&-water punishment at the teen-age reformatory in Buena Vista.

Unhappy state officials ran for cover. The chairman of the State Institutional Control Board said that he had already resigned. Another board member quit. The guard who whipped Anthony Lombardi was fired.

But aroused Coloradoans, who had watched a grand jury hand down 14 indictments of Denver police for corruption, brutality and murder, clamored for a full-scale housecleaning.

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