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Relatives of a victim of the 1999 Columbine school shooting, which left 12 students and one teacher dead and another two dozen injured, were ticketed by the state of Colorado after they visited a privately built memorial for the victims.
According to Denver’s KUSA-TV, Mike and Rhonda Haggerty recently visited a memorial on private land inside Roxborough State Park.
There, an artist erected 13 crosses in memory of the victims of the gun and bomb attack by students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who eventually killed themselves.
Kyle Velasquez, a cousin to Rhonda Haggerty, was among the victims.
The Haggertys have been visiting the private memorial for years. On their most recent visit they said an access road to the site was blocked off, so they parked on the side of the road and hiked to the crosses.
They told KUSA what happened next.
“When we got back to our car, the ranger was waiting for us,” Mike Haggerty said. “He was asking us what we were doing up here, and we told him we came up to see the crosses.”
The ranger wrote them a $50 ticket for being in the wrong place.
“When this couple did come out to visit this area where the crosses are, they did walk across the grassland. So they were issued a ticket for unlawful entry,” park spokeswoman Jennifer Churchill told the station.
She told KUSA the park is investigating.
“We didn’t really want to be ticketing folks who [might have] misunderstood how to get to this area,” Churchill said.
