Man sets house on fire after killing grandmother .2015

Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This article contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.

A shilling discovery in the basement…

the beloved matriarch of a tight-knite family  found beaten to death and lit on fire

 detective  raymond purvis:” it was a vicious and and violant attack.

who wan ted to  hurt  this  harmless grandma?  detectives investigate a possible buglary gone  bad.

but  no, this is  something much  more personal , in a bombshell discovery DNA at the scene ,identifies five potential suspects from  her family

 Detective raymond  purvis:”   Anthony  Sena,devin Sena. bruce Sena , Sebastian  Sena . and we   have  joseph Sena.

 so, hwo  is  the killer?

Fire crews rush to a house fire call in Pueblo, Colorado, but they found much more than just flames and smoke. They uncovered a deadly plan that would rip a loving family apart

911 call

katarina:” oh my god! it´s my mom that´s on fire . oh my god. oh my god.  my mom´s on fire !

A frantic  911  calls  as  a daughter  searches for  her mother inside a smoke filled house.

for susan hernandez her family was  everything it ´s been  six months since the love of her life her husbands  of 59  years carlos died.

Now to keep her kompany in her Pueblo  colorado home is her dog baby 

 and vanessa one of her daughters who lives right across  the street

Katrina who lives about 45  minutes away talks to her mom  daily.katrina says her mom hadn´t  been  sleeping well and    she´d been s sressed out about the  new roof she´d hired  her grandson anthony  to put on.

   Grandson Anthony .

In  any case the devout catholic had a  tried  and true way for  dealing   with  her worries.

katrine:” pray that´s what my mother did  whenever  anything went wrong in her  life  she would turned to god and pray.

But on this one wednesday in late july ,77 old susan hernandez would need so much more  than prayers

Katrine: that  wednesday morning first thing i did was called mom  a  little bit after  seven  in the morning .

But her mom did not  pick up so, so katrina left a voicemail

katrina : told her  i talked to her later ,told her  have a good day,gotta brush my teeth and for some reason i thought  i´m gonna call mom  again, it was around  7:15-7:17. i called mom again,

Still  no answer. katrina tries her  again later ,   nothing.

katrina : i  had a horrible gut feeling going thtough my stomach, i closed up my   house and  uhm.. i drove down to  Pueblo

When katrina  arrives at her mom´s house  she´s   greeted not by her but  by  clouds of smoke. sees where the smoke  is coming, katrina make this gut – wrenching call to 9-1-1

 911 call

operator: ” police departement ,can i help you?

katrina :” yeas  there´s a fire at  my mothers house

operator: what´s burning?

 katrina:  the house is full of smoke .i cannot find my mother .

operator: you dont  see any flames?

 katrina: what?  yes , theres  flames in  the basement. and her music´s on, the door , the  door , front door is broke,like somebody broke in, i …  she  might be  in the basement i dont know. but  the house is full of smoke ,please. send somebody .

 operator: they´re coming right now.

 katrina:okay! mom! im in the basement now.

operator: katrina i want you to get out of the house.

katrina: okay. mother!mom!mom!okay , im going now.

 

katrina goes outside but the  intense need to find her mom pulls her  back in  what she´s about to see its beyond comprehension

911 -call

operator: i dont want you to go in there.

katrina : im here . im in here.i cannot leave. il be okay.mom!mother! god  ,can they check the basement as soon as they get here? im afraid  she´s down there. mother!mom ! mom!mom!  mom!  oh my god !  it´s  my mom that´s  on fire. oh my god. oh,oh my god , my mom is on fire !  oh  my good

 

police and fire crews already on   their way to what they think is a structure fire here this over the radio.

operator it´s possible burglary as well. she found her mother in the basement on fire

detective raymond purvis who is s assigned  to the case comes from   law enforcement family he´s  a relative of famed FBI  agent melvin purvis. considered  to be the man who got gangster john dillinger.

FBI  agent melvin purvis

gangster john dillinger.

as detective purvis approaches  the house ,he immediately notices  signs of force entry The door jamb was broken and splintered it appeared that someone  had kicked  open the door .

Inside things seems to be  untoched and nothing  was out of order

detective raymond purvis :”  miss hernandez kept that house immaculate

Then  the det.purvis made his way to the basement.

det.purvis:”so you go down  into the basement and you hade mrs  hernandez ss,s she had been set on fire.

but that wasn´t all, investigators  would soon learn that  susan hernandez had been    bludgeoned.

She had a large hole to the back of  her head, she had been struck multiple times.

and we knew that because of the cast off o f the blood splatter at the scene.

det .  purvis:” we definitely knew it  was a homocide there was no question about that.

katrina´s  sister brenda was at work  when she got the news when she arrives.

brenda:” i saw the crime scene tape and i knew she was murdered at that point.

and other distraught family members also showed up to the horrific scene. There along with Brenda and Katrina is their sister Vanessa, who lives across the street, her sons Devin and Anthony, and their cousin Sebastian.While police canvass the neighborhood, family members are escorted to the station for routine questioning.

cops get other leads and learn susan was last seen alive.

” supposedly  she was last seen the day before, earilier in the morning walking  her dog. said det. purvis .”There was also a neighbor that stated she had maybe saw a suspicious male who walked back and forth up from the river. We were also told that the night before there were some lights on in Mrs. Hernandez’s house. It was just unusual for her to have the lights on, she was going to bed usually pretty early, and the lights stayed on throughout the night.”

“We had them all transported down to the police station, and began to interview them as witnesses,” said Det. Purvis.

The distraught family members are all brought to different interview rooms.

“I was assigned to interview Anthony Sena, which is Susan’s grandson,” said Det. Purvis.

Anthony Sena was the one who was supposed to redo Susan Hernandez’s roof. She’d been stressed out about it, causing her to have some sleepless nights.

While waiting for Purvis, Anthony notices the cameras and switches seats. He then receives a call. Then he makes a call. Minutes later, Det. Purvis comes in to start the interview.

Purvis establishes that Anthony saw and talked to his grandmother on Monday. Anthony then tells Purvis he went to her house again on Tuesday, this time with his brother Devin and his 10-year-old daughter. But on Tuesday she didn’t answer the door or any of his calls that day.

But back to the roofing job, a job he was going to do with his brothers Bruce and Devin and cousin Sebastian. Anthony says his grandmother had written him two checks, one for the materials and one for the labor. He tells Purvis the total was $7,600. He tells Purvis he’s already purchased the materials, but then can’t remember from where.

“The story was starting to not make some sense,” said Purvis.

“Anthony was in trouble all the time since he was little,” said Brenda. “I believe he was on an ankle bracelet since he was like 11, and he was proud of it.”

 Eventually Anthony gives Det. Purvis consent to search his phone. As Anthony sits alone in the interrogation room, he talks to himself, saying “I shouldn’t have.” Then he vomits into a trash can. When Purvis returns, he asks Anthony if he was at his grandmother’s that morning. Anthony says he went by his mother’s house around 6:45 or 6:50 a.m., but says she wasn’t there. His mother, Vanessa, lives across the street from the crime scene. He says he has nothing else that would help the investigation.

Eventually, Anthony and his other family members are free to go. Then a couple of nights later a woman approaches some officers on the street.

Officers wearing body-cameras go to the woman’s house. It’s Vanessa, Anthony’s mother. She tells police she’s worried about someone coming after her if she says something.

“Oh God, I can’t think it ’cause I’ll end up dead like my mom,” she says on the recording from the body-cam. “I think it was all about money, he’s psycho, he’s f—— psycho. I know, I know he killed my mom.”

But who is she talking about?

“I don’t want to die. If we say anything he’s going to come after us,” she says.

The officers ask her if she’s been drinking.

“Oh yeah,” she says. “I don’t have no proof that he did it, I don’t know anything about that. I just have it in my heart that he did.”

So it was going to take some old-fashioned legwork, and some video surveillance to help solve this heinous crime.

Coming  up : an unbeliveable break  in the case.

                                              Det .raymond purvis:” the body had  not been totally burned or consumed.

 All of  them are family members.

WHO want susan  hernandez  dead , the  loving grandmother was found murdered inside her home, the house then set on fire to  try  and cover up the crime, police would zoon zero in on  a suspect and they wouldn´t have to far.

working from inside out , cops ,talked to the family of susan hernandez first. her  grandson anthony sena just one of those   interwiews.

detective:did you  have anything to  do  with this ?

anthony: hell nah.

It was shaping up to be a real  whodunit….

det raymond: we did not have  a murder weapon at that  time. there was nothing  at the house  a whole lot that we could  go on .

so it was going to take som old – fashioned legwork.

and some video  suirveillance to help solve this heinous crime.

            det. raymond. mrs hernandez  had been seen at a  store  in the area around,i  believe around noon, mayby  12 ,30 so with                   that  time that she was alive around , 12:30 and she was potentially not alive around ,2.30. or 3. because she wasn´t                                                                                  answering   her phone.

Investigators believe she  was killed on tuesday between  noon and 3 pm. and the house was set on fire  the next day.

 

A week later the family is back  at the police station for som routine fingerprinting and   photographs .detective purvis is once again assigned to anthony Sena.

 detective raymond:” so we´re walking down the hallway ,he stops me and says .um … you don´t have anything on me if, if you had anything on me you´d  arrest me by now. and  he  looked  at me and said  you know god stopped that  fire. and i said  ” no  , the fireman stopped that  fire” but i thought about it for a minute and i said  ,you know what i think, god did   stopped that fire  anthony. i think you´r  right.

Little  did anthony  know, who really stopped  fire , was it the same person who started it.

 detective raymond: she was probably burning for no longre maybe than a few hours,whoever  had done this at that time  shut that  basement door,when they set her on fire. and  there was really  not   enough oxygen to get down to that  basement to really ignite  the  the flames so , it was a big break that ,whoever did this, did not let a bunch of the oxygen fuel the fire, because we probably would hasve had the entire house on fire.

 

 and that  misstep led investigators to an absolute bombshell

“The body had not been totally burned or consumed, so there was one hand that had some fingernails or fingers left to it, and when the pathologist had taken the samples from underneath the fingernails we did send them off to CBI, which later came back as Y-STR DNA,” said Purvis.

Y-STR DNA is DNA found only in males. And when the results come back from the lab, this Y-STR DNA identified five potential suspects.

“Anthony Sena, Devin Sena, Bruce Sena, Sebastian Sena, and we had Joseph Sena, which is the father,” said Purvis.

 

 The shocker  ,they are all her own family memberes .

“So we knew that it was one of the Sena members,” said Purvis. “We just didn’t know which one had actually committed the crime, or maybe all at this point in time, we didn’t know. So we began on working to rule out each one and try to find the true person who did this.”

Although cops are looking at all five of these Sena men, clues keep bringing them back to just one: Anthony.

Remember vanessa?  she had talked to officers before.

vanessa:” i  don´t wanna die…if we say anything…he´s gonna com after us.

 It seemed like she  hade more to say.

“One night we got a phone call from her stating that she had found the murder weapon,” said Det. Purvis. “She identified this hammer that was in her kitchen as the potential murder weapon. She believed her son Anthony could have possibly put it there.”

Cops take the hammer in for testing but can’t link it directly to the murder.

Then a break: A man finds Susan Hernandez’s identification and some other cards of hers lying on the side of the road. Phone records eventually place Anthony near the road where the cards were found. Phone records also place Anthony near the house the morning of the fire.

“He suggested that he would give us the money back and we would call it a day,” said Purvis. “We told him we could take the money back but we still have to look at the murder.”

Investigators continued following leads to build a case.

Eventually the missing cash box is found hidden in Susan’s closet. And the other Sena men, one by one, are all subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing. To detectives, Anthony Sena is their man.

“I think he did it with intent,” said Purvis. “I think he did it with deliberation and I think he committed cold-blooded first-degree murder.”

After a four-month-long investigation, Anthony Sena is arrested at his house for the murder of his own grandmother.

The trial lasts two weeks. After four hours of jury deliberation, Anthony Sena is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

“Anthony Sena almost got away with this murder,” said Purvis. “If the hand had been burned, this case probably and could likely have gone unsolved.”

“Every day of my life, every morning I wake up, I relive that day, every day. She was my life, she was everything,” said Katrina. “I will never forgive him for what he did to my mother.”