A man police consider a “person of interest” in the killing of Colorado prisons chief Tom Clements said investigators have focused their attention on the 211 Crew, arresting several members of the prison gang on parole violations as a way to question them.
But Thomas Guolee, 31, said police did not learn much about the case from him because he doesn’t know anything about it. Colorado Springs officers arrested him on April 11 after authorities issued an alert to area police agencies to be on the lookout for him.
“They stated, ‘You’re not under arrest, you’re being detained by parole,’ ” said Guolee, who spoke to The Denver Post on Sunday at the El Paso County Jail, where he is being held without bond on a parole violation. “They were telling me I’m not there as a suspect; I’m a witness to a murder. How can I be a witness to something I know nothing about?”
Investigators have said Guolee and James Lohr, 47, a fellow member of the white-supremacist 211 Crew, were associates of Evan Ebel, who is suspected of killing Clements on March 19 as he answered the door of his Monument home.
Police have said Guolee and Lohr had contact with Ebel, 28, in the days before the killing but have not elaborated on their role in the case. Lohr was captured April 5. Both men were arrested on outstanding warrants unrelated to Clements’ death, and neither has been charged in connection to the killing.
Guolee’s big mistake, he said, was not surrendering when he learned police were searching for him. Guolee said officers who searched the Colorado Springs home where he and his wife had been living took computers, electronics and other items as evidence.
“Anyone who has an association with (the 211 Crew) is being penalized,” Guolee said. “There’s four or five of them in there now. … They’re arresting people on parole violations, and they don’t know anything about this.”
Lt. Jeff Kramer, a spokesman for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, denied that investigators have taken a haphazard approach. Detectives have interviewed more than 50 people, not all of them members of the prison gang.
“Rather rare is the occasion when we have the time to do a shotgun approach to interviews,” Kramer said Monday. “Those we do interview we hope and feel they might be relevant.”
Kramer would not say what information, if any, detectives have learned from Guolee and Lohr but said their status as “persons of interest” remains. He said they were in touch with Ebel after his Jan. 28 release from prison but would not offer a timeline.
Guolee said that’s not the case. He said he was in contact with Ebel just once, in 2004 or 2005, when both were inmates in the Colorado State Penitentiary. Ebel had dropped a note, or a “kite,” to him through a vent, seeking stamps so he could write letters to his family despite limited privileges. Other than that, Guolee said, “I didn’t really know him at all.”
Guolee, who was released on parole in June 2012, said he learned of Clements’ killing from the news.
“I was surprised,” he said. “I thought there was no 211. I was so far away from all of that stuff.”
Sadie Gurman: 303-954-1661, sgurman@denverpost.com or twitter.com/sgurman
