ROARING FORK BROADCASTING COMPANY
A man suspected of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman, supplying her illicit drugs and holding her captive in a van at the Buttermilk Ski Area parking lot for 10 days recently was arrested and is being held in the Pitkin County Jail.
Following a monthslong investigation into the incident, alleged to have transpired over Dec. 15-25, Michael Anthony Brown, 32, was arrested at his van in the Buttermilk lot at approximately 11:40 p.m. Sept. 13, according to an arrest report prepared by the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office. Brown’s last known address is in Paonia but he has been living in the Aspen area in recent years.
Authorities booked Brown into the jail shortly after midnight, court records show. A judge set Brown’s bond at $50,000 cash-only last Sunday.
A public defender represented Brown at his initial court appearance, where he was advised that he faces four felony offenses — sexual assault, unlawful sexual contact, false imprisonment and menacing. He also faces three misdemeanor counts — theft, third-degree assault and obstruction of telephone or telegraph service. Brown is due in court for further proceedings on Oct. 8, court records show.
The arrest came after a judge on Sept. 12 signed a warrant resulting from an investigation led by sheriff’s investigator Brad Gibson.
According to the case’s statement of facts prepared by Gibson, Brown met the woman through her boyfriend in the summer of 2023. Shortly after, the woman broke up with her boyfriend and started buying cocaine from Brown and hanging out with him around his van, says Gibson’s statement, which was based on his and other law enforcement agents’ interviews with the woman, her mother, Brown and other witnesses, as well as evidence gleaned from cellphone devices.
By December, the two were smoking crack together at the victim’s residence, and “Brown eventually pressured her into having sex with him in return for the drugs,” Gibson’s statement says, based on an interview with the woman. Her mother, seeing what was happening at their home, decided to relocate with her daughter elsewhere in the Roaring Fork Valley.
The daughter did not stay in the new home for long. After three days of experiencing withdrawals, she snuck out of home in the middle of the night, met Brown and the two took a public bus to Aspen to get high. The woman told an investigator she planned to return home the next morning, but Brown would not allow that. The two had been on friendly terms but once they got off the bus in Aspen, Brown took the SIM card from her phone to disable its location services and prevent “pinging” to her cellphone, which is a way to determine the device’s whereabouts, according to Gibson’s statement.
The statement continues: “Once inside Brown’s van, (name omitted) said Brown took her phone, removed the SIM card and hid the card. She told Brown she was going to leave on the RFTA bus later. She said Brown replied, ‘You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying here now. Like, you’re not going back to your house.’ (Name omitted) said that was when it hit her that she did not know what was going to happen next … ‘cause I thought I was just coming here to get high, and then I was gonna go home.’” This information was provided by the alleged victim to Deputy Cameron Daniel during a March 14 interview.
Friends and family tried to reach the woman during those 10 days but were unsuccessful, and authorities determined at the time the victim was an adult who could not be considered a runaway because of her age. During that period, the mother had been in contact with the Aspen Police Department and a public agency co-responder technician, and she reported her concerns to the sheriff’s office on Dec. 22, the statement continues.
The mother was suspicious that her daughter was living in the van at the Buttermilk lot, prompting a deputy to visit the vehicle “with no luck,” the statement says.
When she was interviewed March 14, the woman told authorities her timeline became blurry after entering Brown’s bus, but she spent much of the time looking for the SIM card when Brown was away working. When Brown would return and see that she had been rummaging through the van looking for the SIM card, he would become furious and threaten her, Gibson’s statement adds.
One time, “Brown threatened to go to her house and burn it down with everyone inside of it because she had flipped his mattress or something looking for her SIM card,” the statement says.
In addition to the crack cocaine she received, Brown was feeding her pills and threatened to sexually traffic her, the statement continues. She alleged that Brown beat her as well.
Gibson’s statement also cites testimony from an April 1 hearing held in Garfield County Court, when a judge granted a permanent protection order forbidding Brown from having contact or communications with the woman.
“After all the testimony, the court found under the parameters of the hearing that Brown committed unlawful sexual contact, sexual assault, physical assault, and domestic violence,” the statement says.
Testimony from the woman’s friends at the hearing recounted the December incident that ended on the morning of Christmas Day. That’s when the woman found the SIM card, reactivating her phone’s location services and allowing her to place calls. The mother, who had tried texting and calling her daughter while she was missing, also noticed when the location services were reactivated.
Testifying at the hearing, a friend said the woman, after finding the SIM card, called her at 7 a.m. on Christmas Day and “was freaking out, saying the (van’s) heat had shut off, she did not know what to do, that Brown was gone, but she did not know how long he was going to be gone,” Gibson’s statement reads. “(The victim) said (she) was scared to leave because Brown was threatening her, threatening to hurt her mother, and threatening to hurt anyone who would try to get her out of the situation she was in.”
Friends located her that morning in the van. Brown was not there at the time.
“I remember she came out, like, and it seemed like she squinted her eyes so hard like she hadn’t been outside for a long time, like, her ankles were, like, as big around as toothpicks,” a friend testified at the hearing. “I mean, I’d never seen her so skinny. … It was almost like she didn’t really recognize who was even in front of her, like, she was just so incoherent, like it was really scary.”
Friends took the woman to Aspen Valley Hospital for further examination. There, the mother met with her daughter. Because she was disheveled, unkempt, unstable and in disarray at the time, the mother decided to not have her undergo a sexual assault examination at the time. The family put security cameras in their home upon return.
Authorities did not file criminal charges against Brown over the incident after the woman was found. Following the April civil restraining order hearing (the woman initiated the court action March 11), Gibson started interviewing witnesses for the case on April 16.
Gibson’s statement says that when he interviewed her on April 18, “(The mother) told me how she struggled for the next 10 days trying to find and help her daughter. She said she spoke with the Aspen Police Department, but law enforcement had few options to help with the situation.”
Deputy District Attorney James Stone in Aspen is prosecuting the case. He could not be reached Thursday and Friday for comment.