AURORA, Colo. — Aurora police confirmed Monday afternoon that the two stabbings in Aurora on Sunday are likely connected. Stories like these can bring up concerns about safety, so Denver7 dug into the data, looking at crime trends across the state.
Since the start of 2025, we've reported on at least eight separate stories involving stabbings across the state.
There have been 12 victims since January, one attempted stabbing, and at least five of those were deadly.
Michael Campbell, criminologist and professor at the University of Denver, teaches classes that focus specifically on homicides in Colorado. Campbell said despite those numbers, right now the nation is seeing the steepest drop in homicides — not just stabbings — in history.
He used Denver, where the university is located, to explain his research.
"Denver saw an uptick that had happened just before the pandemic started, and then things leveled off and came back down. And just like the rest of the country, the homicide rate in Denver shot up sharply in 2020 2021 and then peaked in 2022 and the increase was significant. It was it was a very large increase," Campbell said. "The good news is, is in the years since then, the homicide rate has dropped sharply, and so things, things are definitely trending in the right direction, but these sorts of one and two year trends are not easy to they're not easy to interpret."
Following Sunday's stabbings, Denver7 looked at Aurora's data specifically to see what's happening in 2025. It's all tracked by the Aurora Police Department.
In data published Thursday, the Aurora Police Department reported 15 murders. That does not include Sunday's two deadly stabbings. The city reported 18 at this time last year.
In September of 2022, around the time Campbell reported that nationwide peak, APD reported 30 murders with about three months left in the year.
*Editor's note: Previous reporting said the two stabbings were separate cases and a connection had not yet been made. This was before Aurora police gave an update on the investigation Monday afternoon.
