Fire officials ID cause, origin of Independence house fire linked to suspected shooter
Last week’s fire in the Independence house where a body was found Wednesday that police believe was suspected highway shooter Oscar Sanchez-Munoz was set in a first-floor bedroom, the Missouri Division of Fire Safety has found.
The fire started around midnight on June 16 during a standoff with police, hours after the shootings along Interstate 670 and Interstate 70 left four people injured and one dead.
“DFS determined the fire started on a bed in the bedroom using available combustibles and an open flame (no accelerant),” Mike O’Connell, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Public Safety, said in an email Friday afternoon.
“There is no estimated loss at this time.”
O’Connell said the Independence Fire Department requested assistance from the Division of Fire Safety — formerly known as the State Fire Marshal’s Office — to investigate what caused the fire and where it started. He said a final report would likely be ready in a couple of weeks.
“That was the extent of our involvement,” O’Connell said in a phone call. “They were not looking for a body. They were looking for the cause, which they determined was arson, and they determined that it originated in a first-floor bedroom. That was their responsibility — not to go in and search the residence as part of the law enforcement.”
O’Connell said the Division of Fire Safety routinely conducts investigations into the cause and origin of fires in Independence. The agency also is currently assisting the Kansas City Fire Department on FIFA World Cup match days, he said.
Cadaver dog confusion
On Thursday, Kansas City Fire Department officials said that a cadaver dog had alerted them the night of the fire to possible human remains in the flooded basement of the house in the 700 block of Brookside Avenue but that a search had turned up nothing.
That launched a weeklong manhunt that came up empty until Wednesday, when Sanchez-Munoz’s family members reported that they had found a body in the basement after smelling a strong odor.
Authorities struggled to explain how they missed finding the body sooner. Kansas City police said Wednesday afternoon that investigators had conducted a thorough search of the house but that the basement was flooded and cluttered with debris after the fire, making it difficult to maneuver.
Battalion Chief Michael Hopkins said Thursday that the department had shared the information about the cadaver dog with the lead investigators before leaving the scene after the fire. No follow-up was done by the Fire Department, he said, because it wasn’t in charge of the investigation. But a Kansas City Police spokesperson said its investigators weren’t told about the cadaver dog’s alert.
Later Thursday, the Fire Department issued a news release saying it wanted to clarify the earlier statements about its assistance in responding to the fire. The news release said that the dog had given a “soft alert” in the basement and that a battalion chief had conducted a thorough search “of all accessible areas of both the first floor, where the individual was believed to have been, and the basement where the dog alerted.”
No human remains were found, the news release said, and the battalion chief told the investigating agencies “that he had searched every area that was physically accessible and, based on those search efforts, did not believe there were human remains in the areas that could be examined at that time.”
“We believe it is appropriate to provide that context so that our law enforcement partners are not portrayed as having disregarded the assistance that was provided,” the Fire Department said.
A string of shootings
The discovery of the body marked the conclusion of the manhunt that started after Sanchez-Munoz was accused of shooting at cars on June 16 at Interstate 670 and Wyoming Street, Interstate 70 and Paseo Boulevard, I-70 and Prospect Avenue, and Truman Road and Hardesty Avenue.
Among those injured in a time span of less than 30 minutes was an Uber driver taking fans to the Argentina-Algeria World Cup match and a woman who had just left work and was heading to pick up a family member. She said she heard a noise as she was exiting I-70 and was shocked to find she had been shot in the leg.
Jeremy Keenan, the man who died, was found in a vehicle that crashed along 6600 E. Truman Road, just outside Kansas City Fire Station 27. He had been shot and was pronounced dead at a hospital.
Police also linked Sanchez-Munoz to a June 11 shooting in Kansas City, Kansas, where another vehicle was struck by gunfire.
No one was injured in that incident, but the shooting set off an alert to officers in the metro.
