John Jefferson
George Vigil (Denver Police Department).
An argument about a bottle of hot sauce in Colorado elicited a fiery and ultimately fatal rage over the weekend that left one man dead and another behind bars, police in the Mile High State say.
George Vigil, 19, stands accused of one count of murder in the second degree, the Denver Police Department said in a relatively sparse press release issued on Monday afternoon.
Several aspects of the case are shrouded in mystery, but, in the end, someone the defendant knows was stabbed to death, according to an affidavit of probable cause obtained by Law&Crime.
The incident occurred at a residence on Federal Boulevard near Empower Field at Mile High Stadium, the home of the Denver Broncos football team in the National Football League. On Sunday evening, just before 5:22 p.m., 911 dispatchers received a call about the stabbing.
“Hello, I have someone stabbed,” a woman on the other end said.
“In the background of the call voices could be heard yelling,” the affidavit reads.
The woman told the dispatcher she was with “two gentlemen and a female, and one gentleman with a knife.” She described the injury as having impacted: “the gentleman on the left side of his ribs.”
“I just need somebody here right away,” the 911 caller continued — by now pleading for help. “We need an ambulance here right away. Right now. Right now. He’s bleeding to death, please.”
The dispatcher then asked: “Who did this to him.”
The woman replied with the defendant’s full name.
“George Vigil,” she said.
Responding officers assessed the scene while medical crews attended to the victim, according to the affidavit.
The victim was described as having “two separate sharp force injuries,” police wrote. The man suffered one stab wound to his left rib cage and another stab wound to his left back.
He was then rushed to the Denver Health Medical Center, where he succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced dead at 5:59 p.m.
In the heavily redacted court document, police suggest Vigil made an unprompted statement of some sort to police as he was being arrested — the entirety of that sentence, however, is censored.
“George VIGIL’s hands and clothing were stained with apparent fresh blood,” the law enforcement narrative picks up. “He had no visible open or bleeding injuries to his person. As officers took him into custody and were walking him to the vehicle, he asked for an attorney.”
A witness whose identity is also redacted in the affidavit told police that the victim has some sort of relationship with Vigil and earlier that same evening had “arrived to visit as he usually does more than one time per week” to “check on” something or someone there.
The witness then described the argument and resulting violence as explicitly about the location of a bottle of hot sauce.
“[The man] wanted to make a sandwich and asked where the hot sauce was,” the affidavit reads. “George VIGIL stated that the bottle was in his bedroom upstairs. An argument erupted between family members over the bottle of hot sauce, which resulted in both [redacted] and [redacted] physically separating [the man] and George VIGIL away from each other. [The man] verbally challenged George VIGIL to fight by making statements to the effect of ‘Let’s take this outside,’ and began approaching him again.”
When the man approached, the witness said, she saw the defendant “swing an arm,” police wrote — believing this to be one of the fatal blows. The witness told police Vigil “often carried a switchblade type knife in his front pants pocket.”
Then, the man “fell to the ground and began bleeding profusely,” prompting the 911 call, the affidavit notes.
Vigil first appeared in court on Monday and was ordered to be detained without bond. While police provided the defendant’s booking photo, he is not publicly listed on the Denver County Jail’s list of inmates. Other information about the case is also presently scarce.
One local member of law enforcement suggested the judge overseeing the prosecution sealed the case.
“When a case has been sealed in Colorado, and a request is made for the records, my office is required to respond that ‘no such records exist,”” a spokesperson for the Denver District Attorney’s Office told Law&Crime in an email.
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