The Best American Magazine Writing 2023, page 19
But for today, she’s been unable to find anyone to babysit. At 3:47 she tries one more time, she calls one of her sisters, but the sister can’t.
Belen gives her kids hugs and kisses, tells them she loves them and promises to bring home almond cookies from the restaurant.
Play with your toys, she tells them. When I get home, we’ll have spaghetti for dinner.
She puts Naya, Adrian, and Alex in the boys’ bedroom, the one just above the kitchen. She closes the door.
And locks it.
At 3:49, she drives away.
21. April 11, 2013, 10:48 a.m. Milwaukee Municipal Court
The same day, at 10:48 a.m., as Angelica Belen’s twins are watching Lilo & Stitch, or perhaps by now they’re watching Stardust, Todd Brunner is supposed to be in Milwaukee Municipal Court.
The court’s docket has two cases in which Brunner has been charged with fourteen counts of violating building-maintenance codes. One count is for not fixing a rental home’s porch steps. Another is for not fixing a foundation to keep out rodents.
His arraignment is this morning. But Brunner fails to show.
The judge finds Brunner guilty of all fourteen counts and fines him $14,050. If Brunner fails to pay, he could be jailed for 171 days.
That sounds serious. But the threat is hollow.
The year before, city inspectors ordered Brunner to fix defective electrical wiring at one rental, defective electrical fixtures at another, and a defective electrical outlet at a third. When Brunner failed to show he had fixed anything, the city charged him, adding three code violations to a long and growing list.
In 2013, Brunner will be called to court to face 134 code violations. He won’t contest any and will be found guilty of all. He’ll be fined more than $100,000 and threatened with more than three years in jail. (Nine years later, he will have paid less than half and served not one day.)
On this very day, the city has at least eleven warrants out for Brunner’s arrest, for failure to pay his fines. Not one warrant will ever be executed. In this, Brunner is the beneficiary of a practice meant to help the poor. Municipal court, not wishing to jail low-income people who can’t afford to pay fines and traffic tickets, generally allows people with warrants to have at least four contacts with police before being arrested.
At 1:18 p.m., two and a half hours after Brunner fails to appear in court, a deed is recorded at the Milwaukee County Assessor’s Office showing Brunner no longer owns the house at 7750 West Hicks Street in West Allis. That’s the house where, at about this time, Belen is cleaning up after lunch, or perhaps getting ready for work.
Brunner, the foreclosure king, lost the home six weeks ago in foreclosure to Tri City National Bank.
In online records, the new deed will take a while to show up. So this evening, when a member of the West Allis Fire Department searches for the home’s owner, Brunner’s name will still appear. The firefighter will call Brunner, get no answer, then leave a message and get no response.
22. April 11, 2013, 7:20 p.m. 7750 West Hicks Street, West Allis
Angelica Belen clocks out at the restaurant at 7:06 p.m., then drives home. Nearing her house, she sees fire trucks. A block from her street, she sees a police officer. He tells her a house is on fire. Which one, she asks. He doesn’t know the address, but with each detail he offers, the north side of the street, the far side of the alley, realization, then panic, set in.
She jumps out of her car, leaving it where it is, the door open, and runs toward her house, in ballet flats, splashing through puddles, praying, please, God, not this, not my kids. People try to stop her, but she runs past. In her yard she finds a firefighter and asks, frantically, about her kids.
There’s nobody in there, the firefighter tells her.
While Belen was at work, firefighters from West Allis and nearby cities had chased the fire through the home. Discovering a locked door on the second floor, they’d used a Halligan tool to force it open. But they couldn’t search the room; the smoke was thick, the floor unstable.
Belen tells firefighters that she believes her children are inside. She says her sister was with them and may be inside, too.
A firefighter climbs a ladder up the side of the house and goes through a window into the boys’ bedroom. Underneath a dresser he sees what appears to be a doll’s hand.
He lifts the dresser and says, “Oh my God.”
Firefighters find all three children dead, their bodies in a corner, touching.
23. April 11, 2013, 11:29 p.m. West Allis
Detective Thomas Kulinski turns on the tape recorder and waits for Angelica Belen. It’s 11:29 p.m., about four hours after Belen learned of her daughter’s and sons’ deaths.
“How you doing? Doing OK?” he asks as she enters.
Kulinski interviewed Belen once already, earlier tonight. She’d told him that when she’d left for work today, she had left her kids at home with her sister Nicole. But police now know that’s a lie. They’ve interviewed Nicole, and Nicole has detailed her day, and the police have corroborated her timeline.
Kulinski, a former marine with a graduate degree in theology, reads Belen her rights. Then he tells her: “Your sister wasn’t there. I can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that your sister wasn’t there.”
He asks Belen, “Who was with the kids when you left for work?”
For thirteen seconds, there is silence. Then Belen says, “No one, sir.”
She tells him that she had no one to babysit, that she’d called around, with no luck, that she’d just started her job, she needed the job, and if she didn’t show, she would have been fired.
“There was nobody in your life at all that could have watched your kids?”
“I have nobody.”
“Why didn’t you build a better support system for yourself?” Kulinski asks.
“What support system? These people were never there for me.”
Belen tells the detective: “There’s been nobody in my life. For twenty-four years I’ve been either beaten, abused, left alone to fend for myself. That’s, that’s what I’ve had.”
24. April 12, 2013, 4:49 a.m. West Allis
“Don’t make me look. Please don’t make me.”
Angelica Belen is being interviewed by Detective Nick Pye, who has brought photographs to the cellblock where she’s now being held. Pye says the medical examiner is having trouble telling her sons apart, so they want her help. One boy died with his face away from the flames. Pye would like her to say if it is Alex or Adrian.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, please don’t,” she says.
She describes her sons, to help distinguish them. Adrian was taller, his hair curlier. He sucked his thumb, and his bottom teeth, the ones in the middle, were pushed in.
“You’re not going to show me the pictures, please don’t,” she says. “Please, sir, please, I’m begging you, please. Please.”
As Belen speaks, her breath is short. She sounds panicked, exhausted. But Pye expects tears. After eighteen minutes, he says, “How come you’re not crying?” She tells him she has cried and screamed, horrified at what she’s done, and now she’s numb. She says she wants to remember her kids the way they were. She asks the detective if he’d want to see his kids this way.
After a half hour, Pye tells her, “I’m not going to force you to, I mean, OK?” When she starts to waver, he says: “I’ll tell you what. Your choice. I’ll slide it face down under the door, OK, and you can take as brief a glimpse …”
“No, no. I can’t, I can’t do that alone,” she says.
So he stays. “You ready?” he says. She looks at the photo.
“Alex,” she says, and he turns off the recorder as she gasps and wails.
25. April 12, 2013, 6:45 p.m. West Allis
Detectives Pye and Kulinski interview Belen for what is now the fifth time. This interview lasts more than two and a half hours.
Belen talks of leaving her children alone. She never wanted to do what her mother did, to hurt her kids. But “in the end,” she says, “I did exactly what she did, only three times worse.” She didn’t want to lose her job, Belen says. She’d told her kids that with her first paycheck, she’d buy them toys. Naya wanted a Barbie Dreamhouse. The boys wanted action figures—for Adrian, Batman, for Alex, Captain America.
The detectives want Belen to admit locking the bedroom door. “I swear to you, I swear to you, on everything that is holy, I would never lock my kids in the room,” she says. They offer her an out: By locking her kids in, she thought she was keeping them safe. The kids couldn’t get to the kitchen and play with knives. They couldn’t leave the house and wander into traffic. Belen refuses their offer.
Finally, after an hour, Pye screams at her, “How did they get locked in the room!”
“I don’t know!” Belen screams back.
Soon after, she gives in. She admits turning the lock. “Because it kept them safe,” she says. She tells the detectives that when she was a kid, she was left alone and nothing happened, “everything was fine.”
Did her kids try to open a window? Belen asks, at one point.
“I think they did. Because there were some toys laying on the ground,” Pye says.
“She tried,” Belen says. “She tried, she did what I told her to do. She tried. My sweet baby girl, she tried.”
Death certificates show the children died from inhalation of soot and products of combustion.
The detectives tell Belen that with the high level of carbon monoxide in the children’s blood, the kids would have become numb. Euphoric, even. “You just close your eyes,” Pye says. “You go to sleep,” Kulinski says.
“The fire didn’t get them first?” Belen asks.
“No,” Kulinski says.
Pye tells Belen about electrical problems in the house. He describes the power hookup to one bathroom as “about the most careless thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“The fire is not your fault,” he says.
Kulinski talks about how old the house is and says, “What are the odds that it would burn down the three hours you’re gone?”
There’s no predicting how things will turn out, Kulinski tells Belen. Some jurors could understand why she did what she did. Some could sympathize with what she’s endured. And some jurors, he says, “will look at you as the devil and want to take you out back and shoot you.”
26. April 15, 2013. 7750 West Hicks Street, West Allis
A lieutenant from the West Allis Fire Department meets with an electrical engineer at the house in West Allis where the children had died four days before. They are among twelve people from four departments—federal, state and local—investigating the fire’s cause.
They start outside, at a pole-mounted transformer. Then they follow the electricity, looking for evidence of arcing, where a current may have jumped off course. They examine the service panel in the basement, then trace the circuits running up, removing drywall and flooring to ensure they don’t lose track of each current’s path.
Ultimately, their investigation takes them to the kitchen and to a space, DATE @ “M/d/yyyy” 5/23/2023 foot deep behind a wall, filled with plumbing, heat vents, and wiring. Here, they find their answer. The fire, they conclude, started with a failure in the circuit that powered the light above the kitchen sink.
The state classifies the fire’s cause as “accidental.”
No one is charged in connection with the fire’s ignition. Only Belen is charged, for what came after. Prosecutors charge her with three counts of criminal neglect of a child, resulting in death.
27. June 27, 2013. Waukesha County Court Commissioner’s Office
An employee with Badger Process Service Inc. goes to Brunner’s home on May 31, 2013, to serve an order requiring Brunner to answer questions about money he owes the city of Milwaukee.
No one answers the door. She leaves a card. She returns on June 4 and finds the door open. But no one answers. On June 6 she returns at 10:10 a.m. and again at 8:30 p.m., and both times, “someone is home but won’t answer,” she later writes. On June 9 she sees Brunner’s wife outside. “I’m not accepting anything,” Brunner’s wife says, to which the server says, “That’s OK,” and lays the papers at her feet, which does the job.
Brunner shows up on June 27 to answer questions from a lawyer. But Brunner becomes “argumentative,” standing and swearing and asking why he has to be there, according to a court commissioner’s affidavit. Sit down and stop swearing, the commissioner tells Brunner. Brunner does neither; he shouts and waves his arms. The commissioner orders him out, but Brunner refuses, so the commissioner asks his secretary to notify the police, at which point Brunner leaves, “using profanity all the way out the door.”
Brunner gets held in contempt, and a new hearing is scheduled, for which Brunner fails to appear, leading to another motion for contempt, for which Brunner must be served, leading another process server to his door, where, twice, the server hears a dog barking but gets no answer.
28. September 27, 2013. Milwaukee County Circuit Court
Twenty-one years after Angelica Belen’s mother was sentenced in the death of Marisol, Belen appears for sentencing in the deaths of her three children. The prosecutor is the same. It’s Mark Williams, an assistant DA with thick, gray hair, who, according to one newspaper story, has likely prosecuted more homicides than anyone in the country.
Colleagues call him a “machine.” Williams, in another newspaper story, says that he works from morning to midnight and that prosecuting homicides is his “dream job.” Before he’s through, he will prosecute more than 700.
Belen has pleaded guilty to all three felony counts of child neglect resulting in death. Each count carries a maximum prison sentence of fifteen years.
The defense submits a memorandum from a sentencing mitigation specialist who writes, “Ms. Belen unfortunately experienced perhaps one of the most tragic developmental histories that this writer has come across in twenty years of working with indigent, criminal defendants.” Belen’s crime, he writes, “was an offense of omission rather than commission.… Additionally, there has never been any report of Ms. Belen abusing her children physically, emotionally, or verbally.”
Members of Belen’s family address the sentencing judge, some to condemn, others to defend.
Two of Belen’s sisters describe the pain of losing their nephews and niece and blame Belen. “Time will not heal these wounds,” one sister says. Belen “had so much help and support around her” but turned it away, this sister says.
Angelica’s aunt—who was in court when Angelica’s mother was sentenced, in the hospital when Angelica was born, and now in court as Angelica is sentenced—says: “She was ill-equipped and overwhelmed. And it’s not true when people say they were falling all over themselves, offering to help her. That’s not true.”
This same aunt, in a letter to the judge, described her niece’s history of being abused: “People wonder why Angie didn’t reach out for help. But I have to ask, would you? The system and the important people in her life failed her over and over. She learned as a young girl not to trust anyone.”
Williams, the prosecutor, laces into the Bureau of Child Welfare for leaving the children with Belen despite all the reports of her neglect. “And this house, we—everybody knew that this house was not exactly in good repair,” he says. “It was possible that anything could have happened.”
When Belen’s mother was sentenced, Williams had said of her crime, “I don’t understand it.” Now, he says of Belen’s crime, “It’s beyond comprehension.” He asks the judge to sentence Belen to a “period of substantial confinement” for each of the three counts. And he asks that the sentences run back-to-back, saying that’s what each child deserves.
Belen, offered the chance to speak, tells the court: “I would like to say that I’m sorry to my children, my beautiful Adrian, Alexis, and Nayeli. I’m sorry they will never grow up. I’m sorry I will never see you graduate from high school and get married and have children of your own. I’m sorry that my decision that day took that from you.”
Belen apologizes to her sisters, to her aunt, to the police and firefighters. She says of her children, “They were everything to me, and I loved them so much.”
At the hearing’s end, the judge, Jeffrey Wagner, tells Belen: “I don’t think there’s anybody in this courtroom that would disagree that you loved your children very much.”
“I understand your—your terrible, terrible upbringing. I know that you’ve been victimized yourself growing up,” he tells her. “But there shouldn’t be this cycle.”
He gives her six years in prison on each count—and orders the sentences to run back-to-back.
Belen, sentenced to eighteen years, gets sent to Taycheedah, the same prison where her mother was sent.
29. October 7, 2014. Pewaukee
A federal grand jury returns an eleven-page indictment against Todd Brunner and his son Shawn for financial misdeeds. To reach this point, the government has expended enormous resources. Here’s the investigation and charges, by the numbers:
Agencies involved in the investigation: 4 (FBI, IRS, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Milwaukee Police Department)
Boxes of evidence collected in search of Todd Brunner’s home: 22
Documents collected: nearly 46,000
Felony charges against Shawn Brunner: 4
Maximum years he could face (all charges, combined): 95
Felony charges against Todd Brunner: 15
Maximum years he could face (all charges, combined): 350
The indictment accuses father and son of both bank fraud and bankruptcy fraud. Todd Brunner used invoices that were duplicated, forged, altered, or inflated to make draws on that $2 million construction loan for the senior center, the indictment alleges. With his son, he used three shell companies to hide cars, boats, and more than one hundred parcels of real estate, federal authorities say. The value of those hidden assets, according to the indictment, totals about $7 million.
