Colorado
Man who killed demonstrator in Colorado firebombing sentenced to life in prison
BOULDER, Colo. — A man was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after pleading guilty Thursday to killing one person and injuring a dozen others in a 2025 firebombing attack on a demonstration in Boulder, Colorado, in support of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman looked down at a desk throughout the sentencing. He has meanwhile pleaded not guilty to federal hate crime charges for the attack last June. Prosecutors are weighing whether to seek the death penalty in the federal case, according to his attorneys.
Authorities say Soliman threw two Molotov cocktails at demonstrators at a pedestrian mall in downtown Boulder, a city of 100,000 people northwest of Denver that’s home to the University of Colorado.
Karen Diamond, 82, was injured in the attack and later died. A dozen others were also injured.
Soliman is an Egyptian national who federal authorities say was living in the U.S. illegally. Investigators allege he planned the attack for a year and was driven by a desire “to kill all Zionist people.”
Speaking to the court through an interpreter for nearly a half hour, Soliman offered apologies to the victims and condolences for Diamond’s death. “There are no words that can express my sadness for her passing,” Soliman said.
He said he wasn’t asking for leniency at sentencing for his convictions in state court and wants prosecutors pressing federal hate crime charges against him to seek the death penalty.
“If I went back, I would not have done this as this is not according to the teaching of Islam,” Soliman said. “What I did came out of myself and only myself.”
District Attorney Michael Dougherty said Soliman’s guilty pleas don’t show an acceptance of responsibility but rather “a surrender to the strength of the evidence” against him. Despite Soliman’s claims he doesn’t hate people who practice the Jewish faith, Judge Nancy Salomone concluded Soliman targeted the victims because they were Jewish. “You chose a time and a place and a set of circumstances and weapons that were designed to inflict the most pain that you could,” the judge said.
In a statement read earlier in court by a prosecutor, Diamond’s sons asked that Soliman not be allowed to see his family again “since he is responsible for our mother never seeing her family again.”
Andrew and Ethan Diamond said their mother suffered “indescribable pain” for over three weeks before her death. “In those weeks, we learned the full meaning of the expressions ‘living hell’ and ‘fate worse than death,’” Diamond’s sons said in the statement.
Soliman’s federal attorneys have said in court filings the attack “was profoundly inconsistent” with Soliman’s prior conduct and “came as a total shock to his family.”
At the time of the attack, Soliman had been living with his family in a two-bedroom apartment in Colorado Springs — about 97 miles away. He had moved to the U.S. from Kuwait in 2022 with his wife and their five children and worked in a series of low-paying jobs.
The couple divorced in April.
Investigators allege Soliman told them he intended to kill the roughly 20 participants at the weekly demonstration at Boulder’s Pearl Street pedestrian mall. He threw two of more than two dozen Molotov cocktails he had with him while yelling, “Free Palestine!”
Police said he told them he got scared because he had never hurt anyone before.
Federal prosecutors allege the victims were targeted because of their perceived or actual connection to Israel. Soliman’s federal defense lawyers argue he should not have been charged with hate crimes because he was motivated by opposition to Zionism, the political movement to establish and sustain a Jewish state in Israel.
An attack motivated by someone’s political views is not considered a hate crime under federal law.
State prosecutors have identified 29 victims in the attack. Thirteen were physically injured. The others were nearby and considered victims because they could have been hurt. A dog was also injured in the attack, and Soliman was charged with animal cruelty.
Soliman’s wife, Hayam El Gamal, and their children spent 10 months in immigration detention until a federal judge in Texas ordered their release in April.
An immigration appeals court had dismissed their case to stay in the U.S. and issued a deportation order. But U.S. District Judge Fred Biery in San Antonio allowed their release on the condition that El Gamal and her oldest child, who is 18, wear electronic monitoring.
Soliman’s attorneys seek to block the family’s deportation until a judge determines they won’t need to be present for court proceedings in his federal case.
On the cusp of the United States’ 250th anniversary and Colorado’s 150th, the Centennial State and its Catholic witnesses show modern Catholics a path forward.
Colorado celebrates its own 150th anniversary this year, as the rest of the country marks 250 years since the founding of the United States. The two milestones bear an interesting connection. In the very year of independence, one of the most important explorations of Colorado was undertaken by two Franciscan friars: Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante.
Faith Crosses the Rockies
While the importance of the Domínguez-Escalante Expedition should not be overestimated — it didn’t lead to any settlements and mostly focused on Utah — it nonetheless symbolizes the coming of the Christian faith into Colorado. Their expedition traces the path the Church followed into the Rockies, initially coming up from the south, to be met later from the East by miners. Leaving Santa Fe in the very month independence was declared, the two friars and their companions crossed into the modern-day boundaries of Colorado at the beginning of August 1776. They were not the first Spaniards to enter the territory of the Ute and Arapahoe tribes north of Nueva Mexico — Juan de Oñate was in 1598, and they also relied on the previous expeditions of Rivera — but the friars opened up more regular access to it as they laid the foundation for the Santa Fe Trail that would lead from New Mexico to Southern California.
The friars found in Colorado beautiful mountain vistas, remarking that it was cold even in the summer, as well as dangerous canyons and abandoned settlements in the Mesa Verde area. Their journal remarks: “We traveled a league and turned west through very pleasant narrow valleys with woods, very abundant with pastures, with different blooms and flowers.” (The Domínguez-Escalante Journal, translated by Fray Angelico Chavez, University of Utah Press, 15). Focusing on possible mission sites more than a continental passage, they insisted to all their companions that they should not “have any purpose other than the one we had, which was God’s glory and the good of souls” (40). Their desires would take 110 years to come to fruition with the founding of the first Catholic mission to Native Americans in Colorado, St. Ignatius, on the Southern Ute Reservation in Ignacio, Colorado, in 1886.
From Frontier Territory to Catholic Settlement
Catholic life was slow to arrive in Colorado compared to other parts of the nation, especially given the early settlement of New Mexico not far to the south. The Spanish were never able to create permanent settlements in Colorado, with one failed attempt near Pueblo in 1787. This is where 1776 regains its significance, even for the Church’s development in the region. It was only after the United States annexed the Southwest following the Mexican-American War in 1848 that Catholic settlement began. From the south, settlers arrived from Taos to establish San Luis on April 9, 1851. Not long after, in 1858, the Pikes Peak Goldrush brought a flood of miners from the East. From this mix of New Mexican settlers, Native missions and Catholic miners, the Catholic Church of Colorado finally emerged.
In 1860, Father Joseph Projectus Machebeuf arrived from Santa Fe and, in the eight years before he became Denver’s first bishop, the energetic priest established eighteen churches. I first encountered him through Willa Cather’s fictional portrayal of him as the character Vaillant in her novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop (and she relied heavily on Machebeuf’s letters for the book). Though primarily set in New Mexico, Cather brings the history of the Church in the Southwest to life through the vibrant, often tense meetings of Natives, Mexicans, newly arrived Americans and the French clergy seeking to unite them into a cohesive whole. It was Bishop Machebeuf who presided over the Church when Colorado became a state in 1876.
A Little-Known Bishop With An Important Lesson
His successor, Bishop Nicholas Matz, likewise came to Colorado as a missionary from France and experienced firsthand the difficulties miners faced in mountain towns, especially as a pastor in Georgetown. Seth Fabian brings this lesser-known figure to life in his new book, The Pilgrim Bishop: The Spiritual Biography of Nichols C. Matz (TAN Books, 2026).
Even after living in Colorado for nearly twelve years and working for the Archdiocese of Denver for six, I didn’t know much about this misunderstood and even controversial bishop, who often lacked support from his clergy. Even in a newly established state, still riding high from its mining operations, Bishop Matz interpreted the events around him with a lens formed by the violent revolutions of the Old World, fearing and overestimating the “potential reach of radical socialists or anarchists” (11).
Bishop Matz’s difficulty in addressing the social question in his diocese points to an ongoing difficulty for both Colorado and the entire nation in this celebratory year marking their founding. Dr. Fabian raises a fundamental question we must consider: “the question of how individual Catholics live their daily lives in a pluralist society” (386).
We have a strong legacy of Catholic settlement across the continent, of our ancestors seeking to consecrate this land to God. In fact, in just a few weeks, on June 11, the U.S. bishops will do so again when they consecrate the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Yet we face pressing challenges that call us to wade into difficult social questions, especially those related to technology and artificial intelligence, as Pope Leo XIV is expected to do in his first encyclical, to be released on May 25.
Despite the real challenges, if we advance, as Domínguez and Escalante did, seeking “God’s glory and the good of souls” above all else, we can continue our great Catholic legacy and open a path for future generations to follow.
Rising tomato prices are putting pressure on restaurants across Northern Colorado, forcing some businesses to adapt while trying to keep costs low for customers.
At Cafe Mexicali, which has several locations, founder and co-owner Rick Krammer said recent spikes in tomato prices created major challenges for the restaurant’s bottom line.
“It’s very important to support and have your local economy thrive,” Krammer said.
But that effort became more difficult as tomato prices climbed and supplies tightened. The issue came as the result of multiple factors including a spike in gas prices, weather events in states that grow tomatoes and tariffs on countries them export them to the United States.
“I cannot charge what we need to, to make the margins that you need to make,” Krammer said.
Krammer said Cafe Mexicali, also known as “Cafe Mex” among frequents, prioritizes fresh ingredients even as food costs fluctuate.
“Our number one goal is to serve the best food that you can, the freshest. At least that’s our goal. And, you have to do that in the economics that work that leave you enough to make your investment work for you,” Krammer said.
Tomatoes are a staple ingredient in many Mexican dishes, especially pico de gallo, making the price surge especially difficult for the restaurant.
“Pico, for example, the main ingredient is tomatoes,” Krammer said. “Those prices went from $7 for a 25-pound box up to $78. Well, that’s tenfold. You just don’t recover that.”
Despite the rising costs, Cafe Mex avoided immediately passing those expenses on to customers.
“What we charge guests is the same, but our costs go up, and so we have a challenge of when we raise prices and when we don’t,” Krammer said.
To conserve product and avoid increasing menu prices, the restaurant recently began offering pico de gallo only upon request.
“It’s going up day by day by day,” Krammer said of the tomato market. “That situation lasted for almost four weeks.”
Krammer said the impact of food inflation reaches both businesses and consumers.
“The economics of pricing, it just affects us all, whether you’re making your own food or having someone else make it for you,” Krammer said. “That pinch is hard.”
He added that restaurants often wait until grocery shoppers begin noticing rising prices before making adjustments of their own.
“We usually don’t do anything until it hits the grocery store, and the public is already educated,” Krammer said. “They know, ‘Hey, prices there are crazy.’”
In recent days, Krammer said tomato prices have started to decline, helping the restaurant avoid menu price increases while continuing to use fresh ingredients.
“Our balance is always to offer the quality with the value,” Krammer said. “It’s worth it, because in the end you need the people to get their value.”
Krammer said the company recently returned to offering their full menu without need for requesting things like pico.
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