A high-profile case out of Weld County involving an attempted murder has renewed debate about the state’s competency laws and public safety.

The case arose from an incident last spring, in which a group of men led by 21-year-old Debisa Ephraim allegedly attacked a man and his friends in downtown Greeley. After Ephraim was found incompetent to stand trial, his charges, which included attempted murder, were dropped, and he was released from the Weld County Jail earlier this month.

The office of Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams posted a video of the Greeley attack on X, saying Ephraim had been released under a 2024 law that, he said, required individuals declared incompetent and unlikely to be restored to be released from jail.

“The state legislature and the Governor have continued to weaken the criminal justice system by handcuffing law enforcement, prosecutors and judges for the sake of criminals,” the sheriff’s office said. “Colorado HB24-1034 has created a crisis where very dangerous individuals are being released to the street to reoffend over and over, this is the latest example.”

Sen. Judy Amabile, D-Denver, who authored the 2024 law, said jails were always required to release individuals found incompetent and unrestorable — and that her bill merely requires courts to dismiss their cases.

That said, she agrees, she told Colorado Politics, that some people should not be released into back into the streets.

‘A senseless act of violence’

According to the victim’s sister, who asked to remain anonymous, her brother and his friends were leaving a bar in downtown Greeley on a Friday night last April when Ephraim and about a dozen other men attacked them.

The sister was not completely clear on what happened next, but she said people were able to identify Ephraim from videos of the incident.

A family member of the victim was able to track down Ephraim’s social media profile, where he allegedly made posts bragging about the attack and other fights he had participated in, the sister said.

“It was just the weirdest stuff; it was kind of shocking,” the victim’s sister said. “The whole thing was scary, but the more we discovered, the worse it got.”

Meanwhile, her brother, the victim, fought for his life. He spent over a month in the hospital with a traumatic brain injury and had to learn how to walk and talk again. While he has mostly recovered, his speech will never fully return to normal, she said.

“His speech will never be the same, and emotionally, the fear and the anxiety that his wife had about losing him and then spending all that time in the hospital and not knowing what the full ramifications are, the loss of income,” she said, “there’s just so much that changed our lives for something that didn’t need to happen.”

“It was a senseless act of violence to the most amazing person. My brother is the sweetest, kindest person; it just seems so unfair,” she said.

The victim’s sister said her family was shocked when they learned the judge had to dismiss Ephraim’s charges after he was found incompetent to stand trial.

“The judge was like, ‘Woah, we have this attempted murder situation that just happened a few days ago and you’re asking me to dismiss the case?'” the victim’s sister said. “It was bizarre.”

It is not completely clear why the suspect was deemed incompetent.

Amabile, the law’s author, said she heard he was diagnosed with an intellectual and developmental disability.

Colorado Politics tried but failed to obtain any documentation shedding a light on Ephraim’s diagnosis. The district attorney’s office in charge of Weld County refused to comment, saying it’s an active case.

Amabile defended the law requiring the dropping of charges in such cases. She said she and her colleagues introduced House Bill 1034 with the intent of making it easier to transition someone declared incompetent from the criminal justice system to the civil system.

Individuals found incompetent to proceed due to mental illness are often sent to a mental hospital, but there aren’t many options for people like Ephraim, who have other conditions, as well as an alleged history of violence. One option is a nursing home or similar care facility, but such centers don’t admit patients with open criminal cases, Amabile said, which is why the law requires the court to dismiss them.

A 1972 Supreme Court ruling prohibited the courts from indefinitely committing an individual declared incompetent to proceed and unlikely to be restored, Amabile said. Because of this ruling, jails across the state were already required to release individuals like Ephraim, the legislator said.

It wasn’t her bill that mandates such releases, she said.

“The thing that we did was say that when you’re releasing them, you also have to drop the charges — that’s really the only thing that bill did,” she said. “They’ve always had to release them.”

“It makes sense that it isn’t the right thing to do to just put somebody in a mental health hospital who doesn’t have a mental illness, but we do need to have an alternative path,” she said.

She did not describe what that “alternative path” is. Amabile also did not elaborate on how to specifically deal with Ephraim or similar cases, though she added that some people might need to be committed to a facility, potentially for the rest of their lives, and not free to roam the streets.

“I understand the frustration that people feel, and I feel it too,” she said. “The families of people who are in this situation want their person to get treatment. They’re not advocating for people to get released — nobody’s advocating for that. The whole point is to get people into treatment and into an appropriate setting that keeps the community safe and keeps them safe.”

Additionally, the state is currently under a consent decree stemming from a 2011 lawsuit that argued the state’s Department of Human Services was violating inmates’ constitutional rights by detaining them for months, while they awaited competency evaluations, sometimes longer than what their criminal sentence would have been.

Under the consent decree, the state is required to evaluate all inmates within three weeks. A recent report found that the average inmate spent 110 days on the evaluation wait list.

The report from the Common Sense Institute noted that the Department of Human Services is required to pay a fine of anywhere from $100 to $500 a day for keeping an inmate on the competency waitlist longer than 28 days — and last year, the average wait time to receive competency restoration was 110 days.

“Colorado is paying interest on its incompetency problem without ever touching the principal,” said John Kellner, a CSI fellow who co-authored the study. “Instead of reducing wait times, our state is releasing dangerous offenders into the community and spending millions on fines that don’t fix the problem.”

Amabile noted that the state has put millions of dollars of funding into helping those with mental health conditions like anxiety and depression, but she believes not enough has been done for those dealing with conditions like schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder.

“It’s something different, and they need this continuum of care, and that’s how we’re going to make our communities safer,” she said. “I talk to families all the time who have had a loved one who was stable for 10 years and then for whatever reason, they stop taking their meds or those medications don’t work for them anymore, and because the family can’t get a placement for them in a state hospital, they end up in jail.”

Ephraim’s case received significant attention from the media, as well as Republican politicians like U.S. Reps. Lauren Boebert and Gabe Evans, who used it as an example to highlight what they called Colorado’s “crime crisis.”

Amabile insisted that the policy many are blaming for Ephraim’s release, in fact, received bipartisan support and passed unanimously in one chamber.

“It isn’t actually about our bill, it’s about the fact that he could not find placement for this person, and that’s what Colorado needs to fix,” said Amabile. “We have to create more placements for people, and we have to admit that there are some people who need to be in a facility, potentially for the rest of their lives. We don’t want to do that for some reason, and it’s all part of this thinking that everybody should be in the community and we shouldn’t have institutions, but we have people who truly through no fault of their own really are sick and they need that kind of support.”

The sister of Ephraim’s victim said she and her family are committed to ensuring that victims like her brother are able to find some form of justice.

“My thing is, we can’t keep making up these Band-Aid solutions,” she said. We need real solutions.”

Legislator urges ‘swift action’ on competency policy

In late September, Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, R-Brighton, who is running for governor, released a statement urging the state to take “swift action” to address “critical gaps” in the state’s competency laws.

Like the rest of her colleagues in the Senate, Kirkmeyer voted in favor of House Bill 1034, but according to a spokesperson, she felt obligated to due to the consent decree.

“The Colorado Supreme Court made it clear decades ago that individuals deemed incompetent cannot simply be left in jail,” Kirkmeyer said. “While the law passed in 2024 sought to address constitutional concerns, it has instead fueled Colorado’s crime wave. Lawmakers must act to fix this.”

The 2024 bill was deemed necessary to fix a constitutional issue, Kirkmeyer said, but argued that its application has “clearly exacerbated Colorado’s crime wave,” in addition to “criminal-coddling laws.”

As the law currently stands, the burden of proof regarding a defendant’s competency lies with the prosecutor when it should fall on the defense, Kirkmeyer argued, adding that the current system “creates risks for both public safety and due process.”

Kirkmeyer also called for the state to invest additional funding into its mental health institutions, particularly the Colorado Mental Health Hospital in Pueblo.

“Our state simply does not have enough beds to meet the demand,” she said. “We must prioritize funding for treatment facilities so that those who are incompetent receive care, while those who are dangerous are kept off the streets.”

Ephraim is arrested again

Ephraim, the man at the center of the debate around Colorado’s competency laws, was arrested again last a month after he was released from jail following the dismissal of the attempted murder charge.

Ephraim was apprehended after allegedly bringing a gun to the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) campus in Greeley. He was not a student, and according to campus police, he was banned from the campus.

A notice issued by UNC campus police warned students about Ephraim’s presence on campus, calling him “someone (they) believe to be dangerous.”

According to the notice, UNC police have had “several interactions” with Ephraim in the past, and officers had grown increasingly concerned with his behavior.

While he may appear to be friendly, “his presence on campus is against the law,” the campus police warned.

According to the Weld County District Attorney’s Office, Ephraimm is being charged with trespassing, possession of a weapon on school grounds and carrying a concealed weapon. His bail was set at $1 million.

In a Sept. 8 post on X, when Reams, the Weld County sheriff, first announced Ephraim had been released in the attempted murder case, he said he hopes Ephraim doesn’t hurt “another victim.”

“I pray this individual doesn’t hurt another innocent victim but the public deserves to know of his past violent actions so they can protect themselves accordingly,” Reams said.