Slain Adams prosecutor 'one of the best'

Both colleagues, adversaries describe slain chief deputy DA as smart, personable man who chose to do public service

By Kevin Vaughan, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 4, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Photos Courtesy Of Seanmaymemorial.Com

Sean May and his wife, Corin, were expecting their first child this fall. May, 37, was shot to death in his backyard on Aug. 27.

Sean and Corin May on their wedding day. They were expecting their first child this fall.

Sean May on the beach in Hawaii.

Sean May was the kind of guy who walked away from a lucrative job in private practice, taking a huge pay cut, because he felt called to be a prosecutor.

He was the kind of guy who practiced his opening statement in one of his first big cases in his living room, trying out his presentation on his dog, Mulder.

He was kind of guy who would slip into work on a Sunday wearing a Buffalo Bills jersey. The kind of guy who kept four things in his office - a photograph of his wife at the Eiffel Tower, a boomerang from a trip to Australia, a scale model of Baltimore's Camden Yards and the award he got last spring that recognized his work on behalf of crime victims.

And he was the kind of guy who, in one of his last acts on this earth, called another lawyer to warn him that he could be in danger.

Now Sean May, a rising star in the Adams County District Attorney's Office, is dead, gunned down in the backyard of his northwest Denver home in a case that is as shocking as it is perplexing. He and his wife, Corin, were expecting their first child this fall.

Officially, the Denver Police Department's investigation is wide open. There is nothing to rule in - or out - the idea that May's murder was tied to his work as a prosecutor, department spokesman Sonny Jackson said.

"That would be totally speculative," Jackson said. "We're doing a complete investigation and not assuming anything."

Wanted something more

Sean David May was born Dec. 28, 1970, and grew up in Fairport, N.Y., outside Rochester.

He graduated from Fairport High in 1989. Assistant Principal Gary Clark remembered him as a bright, well- liked kid whose mother served on the school board.

After high school, he headed west, to Stanford, where he earned a bachelor's degree. Then he was off to the University of Virginia Law School.

After graduation, he came to Colorado and joined a big Denver firm, Cooley Godward, where he worked as an associate in the litigation department.

"He was just a really smart, personable, enthusiastic young lawyer," said Bill Leone, who hired May at Cooley Godward and later served as Colorado's U.S. attorney.

Leone also used the word "tenacious" to describe May. Some of his colleagues at the firm saw that side of his personality on the office basketball team. In the middle of one game, he came up limping, but he stayed on the court, refusing to quit.

He limped around the office for two weeks afterward. When he finally went to the doctor, he learned he had a broken leg.

With a quirky sense of humor - he would call colleagues burning the midnight oil and play them a song from The Simpsons - and a knack for helping others, he was popular. And with a salary well north of six figures, he appeared to have it all.

But May wanted more out of life, so he applied for a job in the Adams County District Attorney's Office, where new prosecutors were paid roughly $45,000 a year. Had it been anyone else, the move might have been shocking. But it wasn't to his colleagues.

"I always had the sense that he might want to go into public service, so I wasn't terribly surprised by that," said Jim Linfield, managing partner of the Colorado office of what is now Cooley Godward Kronish.

Started at the bottom

In the fall of 2001, Adams County District Attorney Bob Grant went through a stack of resumes and picked a handful of lawyers to bring in for interviews. May was one of them, and he convinced Grant that he wanted the entry-level job.

"He was making significantly more money when he came to work for me," Grant said. "And that's one of the things I kind of look at critically - folks who make a lot of money, you wonder if they're going to be happy in a lower-paying job."

May's first assignment was the place where most young lawyers go to learn the ropes - county court. He handled two or three cases a week. Drunken driving. Domestic violence. Traffic violations.

"Some of them want to come to work for a prosecutor's office and build a resume and go out and make a bunch of money, and that's OK," Grant said. "Sean wasn't one of those."

Grant called May "one of the best and brightest."

In the office, May met his future wife. In the courtroom, he made friends across the aisle.

Douglas Romero, who was learning the ropes at the same time as a young defense attorney, came to respect May, who would "go ahead and dismiss a case if it was funky, but if he had strong facts, he would prosecute to the max."

"No matter how heated the fight became, he was always a really, really nice guy," Romero said.

In 2003, Grant gave May a crack at district court, and one of his first big cases was a complicated, emotionally wrought one.

A family gathering had turned tragic after a man confronted his brother- in-law, who was in the throes of a cocaine- and alcohol-induced frenzy. When the night ended, the man lay dead.

May and prosecutor Fran Wasserman took the case to trial and made Colorado history of a sort in the process. ABC News won permission to be involved in every facet of the case, filming while defense attorneys plotted strategy, while prosecutors worked on their arguments, even while the jury deliberated. The Colorado Supreme Court had to approve the arrangement.

When "In the Jury Room" aired in 2004, there was May, practicing his opening statement in the living room while his dog lay on the floor, watching him.

At one point, May stopped, stared at his notes and turned to his dog. "Hey, Mulder," he said. "You wanna try this again?"

Though Wasserman was a much more seasoned courtroom attorney, he trusted May to handle major parts of the case, including the questioning of several family members on the witness stand.

"I can tell you this much," Wasserman said, "he was a quick study, a real quick study."

On the other side of the aisle were defense attorneys Dan Recht and Richard Kornfeld.

"Sean was a professional, hard- working prosecutor, and still a complete gentleman in every way," Recht said. "My grandmother would have called him a 'mench,' " a Yiddish word meaning an upright, honest person.

In the end, the jury sided with Recht and Kornfeld, convicting the man of a much less-serious charge.

Worked with child victims

After Colleen Clark went to work in the Adams County District Attorney's Office, she and May hit it off. They were shocked to find that not only were they from the same town and had gone to the same high school, but that their parents lived on the same street.

"We just couldn't believe it that there were two of us here," Clark said.

They joked about their intertwined heritage, and Clark marveled that May treated everyone the same, that he treated every case - serious or minor - the same.

Most days, he'd sit down for lunch with the people he worked with after zapping a Lean Cuisine meal in the microwave.

"Sean," Clark asked him one day, "do you ever get tired of those?"

"Oh yeah, sometimes," May answered. "But you can't beat $14 a week for lunch."

Don Quick, who was elected district attorney in Adams County in 2004, came to respect May for a lot of reasons. One was that he didn't brag about his academic credentials. Another was that May asked for an assignment to the unit that deals with the most heart-wrenching crimes, those where the victims are children.

"They're the most difficult cases emotionally," Quick said. "They're the most difficult cases because of evidence."

Quick fell in love with his "big guffaw laugh" and his ability to quote Monty Python. And with his dedication to his job. This summer, Quick promoted May to the post of chief deputy district attorney.

"He was the whole package," Quick said.

In April, May was honored with the Edward Towey Award, which goes to the prosecutor in Adams and Broomfield counties who did the most for crime victims.

Final act of concern

On Aug. 27 at 5:44 p.m., Romero's cell phone buzzed. The defense attorney took the call from May.

Years after meeting over county court clashes, they had just again been adversaries. Romero represented a man accused of spying on an 11-year-old girl in a store changing room. May supervised the prosecution.

The case ended with the jury finding the man guilty only of harassment, a charge that carried a fine, but no jail time.

Afterward, a relative of the girl's made some threats. So May called Romero to tell him to be careful, and to warn his client that he could be in danger, too.

They chatted a couple minutes more, mostly about May's recent promotion, then hung up.

At 6:20 p.m., after May arrived at his home in the 3000 block of West 36th Avenue, a gunman shot him several times, then fled.

And a shock wave went through the Denver legal community.

Clues sought Anyone with information about Sean May's murder should call Denver police at 720-913-2000, Crime Stoppers at 720-913-7867, or e-mail DPDMajorcase@denvergov.org.

Services set Services for Sean May are 11 a.m. today at the Temple Hoyne Buell Theatre, 1245 Champa St. For information on a memorial fund, visit seanmaymemorial.com.

• September 4, 2008

  2:59 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  Jennie writes:

  This story is heartbreaking, and my thoughts and prayers go out to Sean May's family.

  I'm not sure how I feel, however, about the RMN making live updates from his funeral. I understand why it was done for an event like the DNC, but I think it's a little distasteful in this situation.

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