Grand Junction Trooper Sues Colorado State Patrol Over Hostile Work Environment

Glenwood Springs —The parking lot of the U.S. District Court in Denver was quiet on the morning of Oct. 21, but inside, a legal battle was heating up. Kelli Litzau, a Grand Junction resident who spent her career patrolling the highways of the Western Slope, filed a federal suit that cuts to the heart of how women are treated in blue uniforms.

Litzau wasn’t a rookie. She brought nearly eight years of experience to the Colorado State Patrol, having served with both the Carbondale and Rifle police departments. But according to the complaint, her tenure at the CSP didn’t start with a handshake; it started with a reprimand. On her very first day at the training academy in November 2021, Captain Rocco Domenico and Lieutenant Colonel Barry Bratt singled her out for wearing false eyelashes. There was no written policy banning them, yet she was ordered to remove them in front of her peers.

That initial brush became a pattern. The lawsuit alleges that female cadets were frequently reprimanded publicly while male trainees received private feedback. After graduating in June 2022, Litzau claimed the disparity followed her into the field. In October 2022, she was passed over for a specialized DUI enforcement team despite a captain’s nomination based on her prior expertise. Major David Rollins allegedly rejected the nomination without explanation.

And that matters because it sets a precedent for who gets the specialized roles and who stays on general patrol. The friction continued over logistics. In April 2023, Rollins allegedly denied Litzau permission to commute from her home in Grand Junction to her post in Glenwood Springs. Instead, she was required to rent a residence in Glenwood Springs for the workweek, costing her $400 a month. The complaint points out that Rollins allowed a male trooper to commute a similar distance from Grand Junction to Montrose in a patrol vehicle.

The physical toll of the job also became a legal issue. Litzau began experiencing significant hip pain and bruising while wearing the agency’s Class A uniform pants and duty belt during field training in June 2022. By November 2023, she sought medical treatment. A workers’ compensation physician recommended she wear a modified Class B uniform with different pants to reduce pressure on her hips. The lawsuit suggests the agency’s handling of this accommodation contributed to the hostile environment that eventually forced her to resign in June 2025.

Litzau told the Post Independent that she tried to fix things internally, but ran into "defensiveness and opposition." Now, the case rests with the federal courts, leaving the troopers of the Western Slope to wonder if the next person in the academy will face the same scrutiny over their eyelashes.