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DENVER (AP) — A man who was questioned but not charged in the killing of Colorado's prisons chief later brazenly tried to break into the home of a former corrections employee and exchanged gunfire with police, court documents unsealed Thursday show.
Thomas Guolee, 34, parked a stolen car in the man's driveway and told a neighbor he was there to drop it off but had lost his key to the garage and needed to find the residents, according to the arrest affidavit that gave the first details about the Dec. 30 incident.
A judge ordered the affidavit released after a successful legal effort by The Associated Press and other news outlets.
It does not say whether the incident was linked to the shooting death of prisons chief Tom Clements nearly three years ago. Nor does it say whether Guolee knew the former corrections officer who lived at the house.
The only suspect named by police in the killing of Clements was Evan Ebel, a paroled member of a white supremacist prison gang who had been mistakenly released on parole four years early because of a clerical error.
Investigators interviewed Guolee and another member of Ebel's gang in the weeks after the slaying, looking into whether anyone might have helped him plan or carry out Clements' killing. Neither man was charged in the case.
Authorities said Ebel killed another man and fled to Texas, where he died in a shootout with authorities.
Guolee denied any involvement in the killings in a 2013 interview with The Denver Post.
He remains jailed on $1 million bond after being charged with attempted murder of a police officer and attempted burglary in the Dec. 30 incident. His public defender, Nicholas Campbell, declined to comment.
The Colorado corrections department alerted employees to the incident after it happened. Officials have refused to release information about the former prison employee except to say he left the agency on Dec. 21 after less than four years.
Guolee has felony convictions that prevented him from legally owning a gun. His parole ended in November after several prison stints. Officers said they found a revolver in the pocket of his sweat pants after the attempted break-in in Colorado Springs.
The former corrections employee was not home at the time, according to the affidavit. His wife told a 911 dispatcher she saw a man in her driveway and heard two gunshots. She barricaded herself in a bedroom with their two young children.
Guolee started shooting almost as soon as officers arrived, the document says. He was wounded by gunfire then drove off and crashed his car about 3 miles away.
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