A Lyft driver idled at the curb near 56 Broadway as its passenger got out, pulled a handle on the locked front entrance and cradled her hands to peer into the disheveled space.
This despite the sign on the door which reads "Sol Tribe is closed at this time."
Inside, employees and friends of the shop have been boxing up belongings after Sol Tribe Custom Tattoo and Body Piercing abruptly closed it doors Monday. An announcement on Instagram said owners thought they had another month of "sorting out details."
“We’re clearing out the building, getting Alicia’s stuff,” said Rusty Lang, who was taking a break for lunch around the corner with Alicia Cardenas' young son. Sol Tribe’s demise has been especially hard because “this community has been family” for artists, he explained, who are often estranged from their birth families.
Life at the popular tattoo and piercing salon was never the same after Cardenas and Alyssa Gun-Maldonodo were murdered two-and-a-half years ago by a white supremacist who walked into the shop and opened fire.
The events of Dec. 27, 2021, cruelly unraveled the Broadway small shop community. Just weeks after the shooting, Gun-Maldonado’s husband, Jimmy Maldonado, and many of Sol Tribe’s artists returned to the scene of the worst day in their lives to work though their physical and psychological injuries.
“I had to go back because the hero part of me wanted to reclaim the space and honor Alicia and Alyssa,” said Maldonado, a beloved veteran Colorado piercer and Jui Jitsu black belt.
Maldonado was in the back of the shop when a bullet hit him in the shoulder and ribs. Bleeding and confused, he ran and hid underneath a car in the back parking lot as he watched the gunman’s boots stomp around in search of him, but they never turned his way.
After the love of his life and the woman he considered his sister were taken from him, he did not have the energy to make a change — but now he does.
Maldonado built Sol Tribe from scratch with Cardenas. He left and started working to build his new space before Monday's announcement.
Mutiny Information Café
The Broadway community of shops and customers which pulled together in support Sol Tribe is still a safe spot for artists.
“It’s an open wound. It’s a sad, hard thing right now,” explained Jeff “The Professor” Foster, a comic book aficionado who works at Mutiny Information Café a block away. Most mornings since Sol Tribe closed, artists gather at Mutiny for coffee and “talk about the past,” said Foster.
He walked outside and pointed to an ornate sea-green mural which Cardenas painted on Mutiny’s south outside wall before she died.
The tops of Barrista Marlo Byrne's fingers spell out S-T-A-Y S-O-F-T. She’s sad to see so many staples go out of business, and mentions the Esquire Theater where she used to visit on midnights for the Rocky Horror Picture Show experience. And now Sol Tribe where she got her first tattoo.
Byrne is not surprised, but she’s sad and she paused mid-sentence to gain her composure.
“Broadway has shifted,” she said. “History is such a big part of tattooing.”
A little further north of Mutiny is Sol Tribe's former competitor, The Ritual Tattoo Gallery — where a crowned likeness of Alicia Cardenas hangs near the cash register.
Apprentice Angel Ramirez said that tattooing has become more mainstream, but Sol Tribe and Ritual stayed true to old school, classic designs.
"It has to have been hard for (Sol Tribe) to stay in that spot," he said.
Some of the Sol Tribe artists will be founding and working at a soon-to-open shop, Cold Moon Piercing and Tattoo.
Friday, Jimmy Maldonado starts taking customers at Wolf and Goat Tattoo and Piercing, though he said he still feels a little fragile.
"My spirit is not back," he told The Denver Gazette. "But these kinds of bad things happen to people every day. You either let it consume you and become a resentful person or you rise above it."
With the restart, he is the happiest he's been in a long time.
"It feels amazing to not have to go back to a place that I constantly had to revisit certain feelings and flashbacks," he said. "I knew one day my spirit would come back into my body. What else was I gonna do?"
The shooting rampage that day began in Denver and ended in Lakewood.
The gun man fatally shot Cardenas; Gunn-Maldonado; Danny Scofield, "Dano Blair," who worked at Lucky 13 Tattoo & Piercing; Sarah Steck, who worked at Hyatt House; and Michael Swinyard, who was killed inside his home near Cheesman Park.
The Jefferson County District Attorney's Office cleared Lakewood Police Department Officers Ashley Ferris and Brianna Hagan in the gunman's shooting death, ruling they were justified in firing their guns to stop him near the Belmar shopping district.
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