Rocky Mountain Community College

Rocky Mountain Community College is the setting for a brief but consequential episode in the history of Grant Rushton, who attended under the assumed identity Mitchell Lee Sartin. He studied biology for one semester while working nights as a security guard; during that period, two female students disappeared, and Rushton came to police attention after being seen with one of them shortly before she vanished. The college episode shows how an apparently ordinary student life and a borrowed identity could coexist with an early, unresolved trail of violence.

Rushton Under an Assumed Identity

A year and a half after a car theft, Rushton resurfaced in Denver as Mitchell Lee Sartin, a student at Rocky Mountain Community College majoring in biology. His identity was eventually confirmed through fingerprints collected when he applied for a security-guard job. The name was itself stolen: the real Mitchell Sartin had died in Boulder twenty-two years earlier, aged three months, in a sudden-infant-death case. The assumed name let Rushton enter school and seek work without immediately connecting his new life to his past.

Study and Work

Sartin attended classes by day and patrolled a pharmaceutical company at night. He lasted one semester and earned straight A’s. His coursework included life sciences and human figure drawing, pairing the scientific study of living bodies with an artistic practice that would later draw the attention of investigators. The school’s records, however, did not lead authorities to his earlier naval identity: the security firm checked local felony files, where his prints did not appear, rather than cross-referencing them with the Navy.

Former classmates remembered Sartin as a gifted doodler. He drew mostly cartoons, including obscene jokes aimed at teachers and other authority figures. He did not work for the school paper or affiliate with any group, leaving a picture of a capable but socially detached student whose irreverence was directed at institutions and people in authority.

Disappearances and Police Attention

During Sartin’s semester, two female students went missing. One was later found dead in the mountains, sexually abused and mutilated; the other was never located. The first known law-enforcement attention to Rushton arose from this college period: he had been seen speaking with one of the women in the cafeteria the day before she disappeared, so Denver police questioned him along with several other people.

The interview remained routine. Investigators had no stated reason at the time to pursue the connection further, and Sartin did not reenroll. He left town and disappeared again. His departure followed the disappearances, but the account does not establish that the college or the police knew his true identity, or that they connected him to the crimes.

Retrospective Significance

The college’s importance lies less in any institutional action than in the narrow window it preserves in Rushton’s movements. A false name obtained through the identity of a dead infant, excellent grades, night work, and a semester of art and science studies gave him the surface of an ordinary young adult life. At the same time, the missing students and the limited police inquiry mark an early point at which he entered an investigative record without being identified or stopped.

Years later, investigators’ fingerprint work connected the Sartin identity to Rushton. In retrospect, the college period becomes a fragment in the broader reconstruction of his aliases and movements, while the fate of the second student remains unresolved. The narrative’s contrast is stark: the orderly facts of enrollment and academic success sit beside disappearances that the institution’s routine life did not explain.