Emergency crews rushed into a hotel room at the Ameristar Casino Resort Spa in Black Hawk, Colorado, at about 7 a.m. They performed CPR on an unresponsive 3-month-old baby before taking the infant to a hospital, where the child was pronounced dead. Black Hawk police and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation are now investigating what happened inside that hotel room, and as of publication, authorities had released no additional details about the circumstances surrounding the infant's death.
Gilpin County and Black Hawk police and fire crews responded to the scene early Saturday morning, according to The Denver Post. First responders administered aid to the baby inside the hotel room before transport, according to FOX21 News, which reported that crews conducted immediate CPR at the scene before the hospital run. The Ameristar Casino Resort Spa sits at 111 Richman St. in Black Hawk, a 536-room, AAA Four-Diamond mountain resort operated by Penn Entertainment that includes 64 suites and a 55,000-square-foot casino roughly 38 miles west of Denver.
The Black Hawk Police Department requested assistance from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and the two agencies are now investigating the baby's death together. Department officials said working with the district attorney's office is common practice in these types of cases, the station's report notes, and Black Hawk police are also coordinating with the 1st Judicial District Attorney's Office, led by District Attorney Alexis King, who oversees felony and homicide investigations across Jefferson and Gilpin counties.
Why State Investigators Got Involved
The CBI serves as Colorado's primary law enforcement support agency, providing specialized crime scene, forensic, and technical assistance to municipal police departments handling complex death investigations. Small mountain municipal departments like Black Hawk's routinely request CBI involvement for technical expertise in unconfirmed infant death cases. Black Hawk's police force operates with 40 full-time staff out of a historic 1870 schoolhouse on Church Street, fielding roughly 8,000 call responses a year in a gaming town that draws thousands of overnight and day visitors thanks to the unlimited-stakes gambling Black Hawk adopted in 2020.
No cause of death has been publicly determined. In Gilpin County, that determination falls to the Gilpin County Coroner's Office, headed by Coroner Zane Laubhan, which operates independently of police to conduct medicolegal death inquiries and forensic autopsies. Because the infant's cause of death remains undetermined publicly, authorities have not stated whether foul play, accidental injury, medical crisis, or safe-sleep factors were involved.
What Colorado Law Requires Next
Beyond the criminal inquiry, Colorado's Child Fatality Prevention Act requires that all unexpected deaths of children under 18 undergo a multidisciplinary review by local public health teams, who evaluate sleep environment risks, maltreatment, and other preventable circumstances, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. If investigators eventually determine the death resulted from abuse or neglect, Colorado law allows prosecutors to pursue child abuse resulting in death as a Class 2 felony carrying 8 to 24 years in prison for knowing or reckless conduct, or as a Class 3 felony if criminal negligence is found instead, per the state's child abuse statute.
The infant's death comes just days after a separate piece of Colorado infant-welfare legislation took effect. House Bill 26-1024, which expanded the state's Safe Haven law on August 12, now gives distressed parents up to 30 days after birth to anonymously surrender infants at designated emergency facilities such as hospitals or fire stations, up from the previous 72-hour window, as Hoodline previously reported. There is nothing in the record connecting that law to this case; it is mentioned only as recent statutory context for infant welfare policy in the state.
No further details about the investigation were available at the time of publication. A journalist following developments in this case would need to watch for autopsy findings from Coroner Laubhan, any statements from District Attorney King's office, and updates from the CBI to learn whether charges are eventually filed or whether the death is ultimately ruled accidental or medical in nature.
