Alex M. Hunter, the Boulder District Attorney most known for overseeing the murder investigation of 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey, died Friday. He was 89.

He suffered a heart attack in November, and had tried all medications that had promised to restore his health, according to his family. Out of options, he asked his doctors to take him off of life support at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, according to his son, Alex “Kip” Hunter III. He died that evening.

Kip Hunter said besides the Ramsey case, his father’s legacy is that of a fair and decent prosecutor, who met regularly with citizens on pressing issues.

“The most important things to dad arising from his time as DA were the victim witness and the citizen reach-out programs he instituted, which were adopted throughout the country,” the younger Hunter said.

Alex Hunter left office in 2001 after 28 years. He was Boulder County’s longest-serving district attorney.

Hunter had founded the Boulder DA’s consumer protection unit “to investigate, mediate, and prosecute consumer fraud,” according to a news release on Tuesday.

He was also “a tireless advocate for victims’ rights,” authorities said.

He created the office’s victim witness unit, the first of its kind in Colorado and among the first in the nation. It was “one of his most innovative and lasting contributions,” according to the Boulder DA’s office.

“Our office mourns the loss of former District Attorney Alex Hunter,” District Attorney Michael Dougherty said in the release. “He led this office and served the community for many years. Alex had a great impact on our staff and all of Boulder County. Throughout his life, he put service above self. His commitment to justice guided this office and he truly loved this community.”

Though Hunter’s career in office was a long one and involved dozens of criminal cases, he was best known for his October 1999 decision not to sign the true bill after a Boulder County grand jury voted to indict John and Patsy Ramsey.

For 13 years, no one outside of the investigation knew of the grand jury’s decision. It remained a secret until reporter Charlie Brennan broke the story after he brought a lawsuit with the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press to make the record public.

The documents, ordered unsealed by Judge Robert Lowenbach, revealed that the grand jury voted to indict the Ramseys on charges of child abuse resulting in death in connection to JonBenét’s death. However, Hunter refused to sign the indictment because he didn’t think he could prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Hunter chose his words carefully when he walked across the Boulder County Justice Center that day in 1999 to a mob of reporters representing dozens of news outlets from around the world.

“The Boulder grand jury has completed its work and will not return. No charges have been filed,” Hunter said at the time. “The grand jury has done their work extraordinarily well. Yet, I must report to you that I and my prosecution task force believe we do not have sufficient evidence to warrant the filing of charges against anyone who has been investigated at this time.”

It was a controversial decision. Boulder Police Department detectives who had worked tirelessly on the case and wanted to see John and Patsy Ramsey in a courtroom were furious, according to investigative sources.

Kip Hunter told The Denver Gazette that his father was proud of his decision not to indict the couple in the face of intense public scrutiny.

“He believed until the day he died that he made the right decision,” Kip Hunter said. “He would have done the same thing now, as he did then.”

Stan Garnett, who was the 20th Judicial District Attorney from January 2009 until February 2018, studied the Ramsey case extensively and, in an opinion piece written upon the announcement of the release of what had been protected information, noted that, because there was never a trial, the community had no resolution to the unsolved Ramsey case.

As a result, he wrote, “the tabloid press has been free to speculate” on what happened the night of Dec. 25-26, 1996.

Garnett also noted that his office handled three times the number of cases that were tried every year in the 20 years prior to his taking office.

Hunter was often criticized for the lack of homicide cases that went to trial during his tenure.

Serving as the top law enforcement officer in a region where the county seat of Boulder was known for progressive attitudes made Hunter’s approach unpopular in some circles. He incorporated social workers and the public health department in the judicial process and regularly held community meetings to measure the public’s thought on local issues.

His relationship with the Boulder police was inconsistent, and when the police turned the Ramsey case over to Hunter in June 1998, a year-and-a-half after JonBenét’s murder, Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner publicly noted that a grand jury should be the next step.

By that September, the long-awaited grand jury first convened and spent 13 months hearing from crucial witnesses, reviewing evidence and watching interviews.

Garnett said he understood Hunter’s decision not to sign the Ramsey grand jury’s true bill, given what he referred to as “the state of the evidence.” He called Hunter an honorable district attorney.

“The Ramsey case overwhelmed the office in the late 90s as it would virtually any District Attorney’s office and Alex did the best he could with the fact pattern of that case,” Garnett said.

John Ramsey, who remarried after Patsy Ramsey’s 2006 death, credited Hunter for surrounding himself with competent staff who dealt with what he believes was a “reckless” police department.

“While it was good not to deal with a trial, we were confident that once our case got in front of a jury, the absurdity of it would be exposed,” Ramsey said.

Michael Kane, the special prosecutor who led the Ramsey grand jury, remembered Hunter as a “good and honorable man” who was “thrust on the national stage and was second-guessed by everyone, including those who believed an intruder was responsible for the death of JonBenet and those who thought it was someone in her family.”

Kane stressed that while so many people made money off of the unsolved case, Hunter never did, noting that the investigation was “as complex and confounding then as it is today.” 

Kip Hunter said that funeral arrangements have not been decided at this time.