The aunt of a 15-year-old boy who died in a house fire while police were pursuing a suspect said he might have been afraid to come out of the house because his father was killed 15 years ago by one of the law enforcement agencies involved in the standoff.
Shela Rosenau told the Daily Beast that Brett Rosenau’s mother was still pregnant with the boy when his father was fatally shot by a Bernalillo County Sheriff’s deputy in 2006. She met the child’s mother, Amanda Lopez, at her brother’s funeral. The family had been estranged until Brett reached out to Shela on social media, looking to learn more about his father’s family.
“I think that may be why little Brett — I think that’s maybe why he could have been scared of cops” and didn’t come out of the house last week in time, Rosenau said.
Witnesses have revealed new details about the incident that led to Brett’s death. An initial autopsy report shows that the teenager died of smoke inhalation. Witnesses said authorities waited 40 minutes for the suspect, Qiaunt Kelley, to come out of the house before going in to look for the minor. Witnesses also told reporters that first responders left Brett’s body in front of the house for some time. It is unclear if that was part of the investigation.
Video footage from the incident show occupants and other people yelling and screaming at cops about the house fire. The tongue lashes quickly turned into painful pleas when one of them remembered the boy was in the home.
“They’re walking like there’s no f—-king tomorrow,” a bystander says of a fire rescue team seen pulling a hose a distance away from the house.
Officers lined behind caution tape as the neighborhood residents hurled profanity and accused the cops of willfully setting fire to the home. The scene depicts the sour relationship between the community and the Albuquerque police. The department is currently under the microscope of the U.S. Department of Justice after a settlement agreement in 2015. Albuquerque Police agreed to “deliver police services that comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States” after the federal agency found it “engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force” in 2014.
The DOJ, in its latest report, released in May, found that the local police agency has made policy and training improvements but still lagged in “operational compliance.”
Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina has acknowledged the devices used to flush Kelley out of the home with irritants may have caused the fire. He cited cases in other states where Flameless Tri-Chamber tear gas canisters ignited flames.
According to Defense Technology, the canisters allow the chemicals to burn internally to reduce fire risk and are designed primarily for indoor use. However, the safety sheet on the devices says individual cartridges could explode in a confined space. It is recommended for crowd control and “tactical deployment” in a “barricaded situation.”
“Forty minutes of smoke inhalation will kill anybody. That’s common sense,” Rosenau said. “So for them to wait 40 minutes, that’s just not right. That’s horrible. I believe in that situation, you save a life, and they needed to go in there… I mean, that’s their job. They should not have sat back and waited for them to come out.”
Lopez’s attorney described Brett as a loving and affectionate boy who excelled at sports.
“His mother was always amazed that he was never embarrassed when she would ask for him to hug or kiss her in front of his friends,” Lopez’s attorney Taylor Smith said.
Smith said the Lopez family is coping with the loss and are looking into what happened on July 6.
“We also don’t want this to go swept under the rug,” said Smith. “So we along with the ACLU requested for an independent and transparent investigation into the police conduct.”
The teenager’s father, also named Brett, was killed on New Year’s Eve during a foot chase with sheriff’s deputies. At least one sheriff’s deputy was believed to be at the scene of the fire last week. Authorities said his father flashed a weapon at a deputy, and a grand jury agreed that the shooting was justified. The Rosenau family denies the claim.
Shela said little Brett was “excited just to meet family” when he reached out to her on Facebook about four years ago.
“He was really excited to see some pictures that I sent to him [of his father],” she said.
Shela said the interactions she had with her long-lost nephew show her that “he’s an awesome kid.”
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