By Christine Dempsey
Hartford Courant
Copyright 2007 The Hartford Courant Company
All Rights Reserved
HARTFORD, Conn. — A fire hose over his shoulder, firefighter James Sopelakcrept up the stairs of the smoky apartment at 42 Great Hill Road in East Hartford. There was a report of an elderly man trapped in an upstairs bedroom, he testified in Superior Court in Hartford Wednesday.
But instead of a man, he came across a little girl lying at the top of the stairs, he said.
“She had a braid across her face. ... Her legs were smoldering and I observed some sort of liquid on her head,” he said. He later learned the liquid was blood.
Sopelak was one of five members of the East Hartford Fire Department to testify on the second day of the trial of Michael Kendall, who is accused of fatally shooting his wife, Ramona, and two daughters, Kayla, 16, and Alexis, 12, and setting a fire in their home on the morning of Dec. 13, 2003. If convicted, he faces a possible death sentence.
Sopelak testified that he thought the girl might be alive, so he picked her up and carried her down the stairs. With the help of Capt. John Colli, he carried her outside, where her legs reignited and had to be extinguished. Colli determined that she was dead, and a covering was placed over the girl as she lay on the front lawn of the apartment building, where a crowd of screaming family members and neighbors had gathered.
When Sopelak returned to the apartment, he found a box of bullets on a chair in the kitchen, he testified.
Meanwhile, firefighter Daniel Wasilewski was on his knees in the room where the fire was fiercely burning — Ramona Kendall’s bedroom.
The safest and coolest place to be in such a fire is close to the floor, he testified, so he crawled around with the hose. He used his free hand to feel around because it was too dark and smoky to see, he said. He saw something burning to his left, he said, squirted it with the hose, and realized it was a dead person.
There was nothing he could do for the person, so he continued crawling and feeling his way around the room, he said. Then, he testified, “I felt what I believed to be another human being in front of me.” The person’s clothes were burnt off, he said. “This victim was in worse condition than the first victim I had found.”
The bodies were later determined to be those of Ramona Kendall and her daughters. No elderly victim was found; Ramona’s father, Adam Alston, had fled the burning home and reported the shootings and fire to his other grandchildren two doors away, according to previous testimony.
Despite objections from the defense, photos of the three bodies were shown to the jury.
Earlier, Denise Alston, a close family friend who became an Alston by marriage, testified that Ramona Kendall had been happy that Michael was scheduled by court order to leave the home by 10 a.m. on Dec. 13. They were going through a divorce.
Echoing the word another witness used in testimony Tuesday, she said Ramona wanted her “peace.” Kiana Alston, an adult daughter of Ramona’s, had testified that her mother had noted the date of Michael’s pending eviction on a calendar.
Patrick Culligan, chief of the capital defense trial services unit, appeared to try to show Kendall in a positive light by asking Denise Alston if she knew about all the trips Michael Kendall took his family on. Through his questions, he suggested that Michael Kendall took them to Disney World in Florida, and to Ohio, Georgia, South Carolina, Niagara Falls and Washington, D.C.