16th Street Mall stabbing suspect arrested in 2021 for Westminster knife attack

DENVER — The 24-year-old man accused of stabbing four people along the 16th Street Mall – killing two of them – was charged with felony menacing in August 2021 after going after a man with a knife in Westminster, 9NEWS Investigates has learned.

In that incident, Elijah Caudill was accused of attacking Corey Ellison, director of maintenance, at an 18-acre shopping center at 120th Avenue and Huron Street.

“At the time, [he] was having a pretty substantial problem with homelessness,” Ellison said on Monday. “You know, in that area, they were very aggressively panhandling, I guess you would call it.”

Ellison told 9NEWS that he’d had four encounters with Caudill – telling him each time to leave the property.

“There was a lot of belligerent speak and stuff like that,” Ellison said.

Then on Aug. 11, 2021, he caught Caudill defecating inside a trash enclosure on the property and told him to leave.

“There was some, you know, angry words towards me,” Ellison said. “He seemed like he was leaving the property.”

Ellison said he believed Caudill was heading away. But as he walked toward his vehicle, he heard something behind him and turned.

“He was running up behind me with a knife out,” Ellison said. “I managed to spin around. We kind of tussled a little bit. I pulled my belt off because that was really the only weapon I had at the time.”

People began to gather to see what was happening and Caudill ran off, he said. Ellison called police, but by the time officers arrived, he was out of sight. Ellison said an officer drove around the area briefly, but didn’t see the man.

Ellison realized only later that he’d been nicked by the knife.

“The next morning, when I showed up to work at like, 8 in the morning, I immediately saw him again in the same clothes and everything,” Ellison said.

He again called police and an officer found Caudill down the road.

“At that point, you know, I got out, identified him to the policeman who had him and he started screaming about how he was going to kill me, over and over again,” Ellison said.

According to court documents examined by 9NEWS Investigates, prosecutors initially charged Caudill with felony menacing. Later, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge in a plea agreement and was sentenced to two years in jail and two years on probation.

It is not clear from the records how much jail time he actually served – and documents show that prosecutors twice moved to revoke his probation because he had violated requirements put in place as part of his plea agreement.

Ellison said he has always been unhappy with how the case was handled.

“I feel the thing that bothers me is I don’t know when, like, threatening somebody’s life with a weapon becomes a misdemeanor, and that you don’t take that seriously anymore,” Ellison said. “And that’s what I felt like, is that it just wasn’t an issue for them.”

The episode left Ellison shaken – especially knowing that police reports turned over to Caudill included his home address.

“It just was a nervous feeling all the time of that,” he said. “You know, my name’s out there now. And my information, this guy has it.”

He said he left his job and Colorado. He and his wife recently returned, but he settled outside Denver.

On Monday morning, he saw a news report about the stabbings over the weekend and briefly thought about Caudill. But it wasn’t until a reporter called him that he realized the suspect in the Denver attacks was the same man who’d come at him with a knife three and a half years earlier.

“I feel terrible for the victims of this,” Ellison said. “It just – it seems senseless, for sure, and especially when there were clearly warning signs and probation violations and things like that.”