Hard Case

Cherry Creek lawyer Michael Andre defended Denver's dark side, until he succumbed to his own.

Friday, 11:30 a.m.

Marie Freyta was scared.

She hadn't slept at home after the fashion show. Her phone had died during the night; when she checked her voicemail from a landline at 10:30 a.m., she had urgent messages from her mother, her sister, Marlene, and a detective. The officer had told her to come to a Wendy's restaurant near her home, that there was trouble with her husband at her house. What the hell was going on?

As she was making the 45-minute drive from Highlands Ranch to the Cherry Creek Wendy's, Marie wiggled the battery out of the back of the phone, willing it to have a little more juice. She popped it back in and turned on her phone. It worked. She typed out a frantic text message to Andre: "I'm meeting with the detective. My phone is going to die. I love you Dre"—she often called him Dre—"please stop this."

Andre never showed up at the fashion show. According to the police report, he and Marie had an encounter at home before the event, during which she told him not to come. Many of the details in the report have been redacted, though it does note that Marie "was not going to deal with him."

It's too bad; Andre would have liked the show—rappers rhyming while a DJ spun tracks in the corner. Marie strutted her curves up and down the runway, her dark hair bouncing with her quick-change outfits—jeans and tops accessorized with hats and belts. She was used to people looking at her; on this runway, though, she had to keep her clothes on.

The two met in the fall of 1998, when Andre was 30. Marie was turning 18, and when the lemon of a car she bought went sour, she wanted her money back. A colleague at the doctors' office where she worked mentioned a good lawyer named Andre, so she rang him up. They met at his office and he assured her it'd be cake—since she bought the car when she was 17, the purchase agreement wasn't valid. She should be able to get her money back.