CBS News
Colorado double murder suspect threatened roommate before shooting, would “Kill him” over trash: affidavit
The man accused of shooting and killing his roommate and another person in a dorm on the University of Colorado- Colorado Springs campus last Friday, Feb. 16, appeared in El Paso County Court on Friday morning. The affidavit detailing what happened leading up the deadly shooting and the arrest of Nicholas Jordan reveals some tension between the roommates and threats made over trash.
CBS
Jordan has been accused of two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Samuel Knopp, 24, a registered UCCS student from Parker, and Celie Rain Montgomery, who was from Pueblo. Jordan, 25, is from Detroit and is enrolled as a student at UCCS.
Jordan and Knopp were roommates, along with another man. They lived in a dorm described as a “POD” with a common area and four individual bedrooms with locking doors. Knopp and Montgomery were found shot to death in Knopp’s bedroom.
One bedroom belonged to Jordan and a third bedroom belonged to the man who called police after he heard the gunshots and the sound of a person moaning. A fourth bedroom was unoccupied, according to the affidavit.
CBS
According to the affidavit, there had been complaints of Jordan smoking marijuana, cigarettes and leaving his trash out. There had also been multiple incidents where Knopp and the other roommate had reported Jordan for unsafe living conditions and smoking in the room.
The court documents detail an argument that happened in January between Knopp and Jordan over a bag of trash. Jordan apparently threatened Knopp and told him he would “Kill Him” and there would be consequences if Jordan was asked to take out the trash again.
Jordan was arrested in Colorado Springs on Monday morning and the judge set a $5 million bond at a hearing on Tuesday.
The UCCS campus is located along Austin Bluffs Parkway in northeast Colorado Springs. It is one of four universities in the University of Colorado system. The others are in Boulder, Denver and Aurora (the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus).
Thanks for reading CBS NEWS.
Create your free account or log in
for more features.
Writer Delia Ephron, famous for rom-coms like “You’ve Got Mail,” knows how to dream up a fairy-tale storyline. But Ephron’s Broadway debut later this month comes directly from the pages of her life.
Ephron has written about intimate things before, but now it is her own life that is on the stage for everyone to see. She said it was not easy, “because I am basically introverted.”
But she sure makes it look easy. When “Sunday Morning” first interviewed Ephron two-and-a-half years ago, she’d just finished a best-selling memoir, “Left on Tenth.” Now she’s turned that book into a play, telling her remarkable story of beating the odds. She said, “It’s the story of a woman who loses her beloved husband of 38 years, and a man from her past drops into her life and she falls madly in love. And then shortly afterwards I got diagnosed with a terrible disease, a fatal leukemia. And I survived.”
CBS News
That’s right: seven years ago, because of her blood cancer, Delia Ephron was given four months to live. She’d already lost her sister, Nora, and her husband, Jerry, to cancer. But she somehow found love again, and got married in the hospital while undergoing chemo (a wedding that Dr. LaPook, a friend of Ephron’s, recorded).
Five-time Tony Award-winner Susan Stroman is directing the play. “It’s about second chances, and love, and life, and being brave enough to take those second chances, ’cause most people aren’t,” she said.
Stroman and Ephron share something in common they wish they didn’t. “I sadly lost my husband to AML, to leukemia,” Stroman said. “So, when I started to read the play, I knew everything about what was going on. I didn’t have to research anything, ’cause I had lived it, too.”
CBS News
She said it is “tricky” to direct the play’s turns from humor, to tragedy, and back again. But it’s a trick Stroman mastered – as “Sunday Morning” watched, tagging along every step of the way, from the first meet-and-greet, to an early rehearsal, to the stage of the James Earl Jones Theatre.
Emmy Award-winner Julianna Margulies plays Ephron. “They’re saying it’s a rom-com, and it is,” Margulies said. “It’s romantic, and it’s funny, and it’s wonderful, but bring tissues, in case you need them.”
LaPook asked stage legend Peter Gallagher (who plays Peter Rutter, Ephron’s newfound love), “The play is about two people falling in love who are not in their 20s or 30s; they’re older than that. What’s the significance of that?”
“Well, you know, you’re closer to death!” Gallagher replied. “Everything is precious. And I think that’s another thing that the audience is going to recognize and feel.”
Asked about the play’s life lessons for the audience, Ephron said, “We plan our lives out as a young person: ‘Oh, I wanna get married. I wanna have children. I wanna have a career.’ You know, you make all these things. But then you don’t think, ‘Oh, what’s gonna happen to me after I’m 50? What life do I want then?’ It’s a much more open book. And this is about seizing those years and really creating something.”
For more info:
Story produced by Amiel Weisfogel. Editor: Remington Korper.
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
An Israeli airstrike hit a mosque in central Gaza and Palestinian officials said at least 19 people were killed early Sunday. Israeli planes also lit up the skyline across the southern suburbs of Beirut, striking what the military said were Hezbollah targets.
The strike in Gaza hit a mosque where displaced people were sheltering near the main hospital in the central town of Deir al-Balah. Another four people were killed in a strike on a school sheltering displaced people near the town.
The Israeli military said both strikes targeted militants, without providing evidence.
An Associated Press journalist counted the bodies at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital morgue. Hospital records showed that the dead from the strike on the mosque were all men, while another man was wounded.
In Beirut, the strikes reportedly targeted a building near a road leading to Lebanon’s only international airport and another formerly used by the Hezbollah-run broadcaster Al-Manar.
Hussein Malla / AP
Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire across the Lebanon border almost daily since the day after Hamas’ cross-border attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 others hostage. Israel declared war on the Hamas militant group in the Gaza Strip in response. As the Israel-Hamas war reaches the one-year mark, nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in the territory, and just over half the dead have been women and children, according to local health officials.
Nearly 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon in the latest conflict, most of them since Sept. 23, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.