Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
August 28, 2026
The Colorado Attorney General’s Office and the 14th District Attorney’s Office this week charged Fabrizio Lorenzin, 65, with four felonies in connection with repeated sabotage of the Berthoud Pass Watershed Ditch and its security cameras over several years. The remote ditch system begins at 11,200 feet high on its namesake pass in the mountains and helps funnel water to Northglenn and Golden. The ditch’s water is stored…in Standley Lake in Adams County. Lorenzin allegedly forced open headgates on the system’s ditches, damaging the infrastructure and diverting millions of dollars’ worth of drinking water from its intended destination downstream. Prosecutors allege that he also stole cameras meant to watch the district’s property…
Law enforcement first began investigating the possible tampering with the headgates in August 2019, according to an arrest affidavit documenting the investigation. That’s when four of the gates that control the direction of the flow of water were vandalized, diverting water worth approximately $1.3 million, the affidavit says…Headgates were damaged again in 2022, diverting $4.3 million in water, the affidavit says. Trail cameras again photographed the same man with the same backpack. Another headgate was damaged in 2023 when it was forced open and propped up with rocks. This time, the trail cameras were also stolen. In 2024, the affidavit says, federal investigators with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency installed three cameras with Apple AirTags attached. More images from the area showed the same man with the same backpack. In August 2024, the AirTags on the stolen cameras pinged from inside Lorenzin’s home, the affidavit says, and investigators searched it on two occasions, finding the disassembled EPA cameras and a laptop that contained images from other stolen cameras. A review of the search history on the laptop found multiple searches for information related to sabotage on the Berthoud Pass system as well as information about trail cameras and headgates, the documents says.
