By DAVID CORREIA

At 3:26 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2010, prominent Albuquerque attorney Mary Han emailed her banker at Wells Fargo. “I’m about to pay off the remainder of the balance on my line of credit,” she wrote. “I would like to know whether I will be able to borrow another $120,000 next year and at what interest rate. Thanks. Mary.”

Less than 24 hours later she would be dead. According to at least one Albuquerque Police official, she killed herself because she was depressed. The New Mexico Office of Medical Investigation called it a suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. But the events of the last few days of her life – days spent making short- and long-term plans for the future – and the strange circumstances surrounding what her family calls a “botched” investigation of her death, have led her family, friends and even some former Albuquerque police officers to doubt the claim by APD officials that she killed herself.

Wednesday,

Nov. 17, 2010

Mary’s friends and family describe her as a creature of habit. She was predictable and kept to a routine. Most days she got up early, before dawn, and either worked out at the gym or went for a run. She often stopped at the La Montañita Co-op on Rio Grande Boulevard Northwest before meeting her law partner, Paul Kennedy, at a coffee shop and then heading to her downtown law office. Just after 8 a.m. on Nov. 17, she stopped at the co-op to buy a small breakfast and a sandwich and soup for lunch later. If she stuck to routine, she then met Paul Kennedy for coffee.

Kennedy is a prominent defense attorney and widely regarded as one of the best criminal defense lawyers in New Mexico. In 2010, he led Susana Martinez’s transition team after she was elected governor. He was appointed to fill unexpired terms on the New Mexico Supreme Court by Martinez in 2012 and former Gov. Gary Johnson in 2002.

Just after 1 p.m., Han went to her regularly scheduled acupuncture appointment where, before leaving, she confirmed a follow-up appointment for the next week. After a quick lunch, she met with her accountant in Uptown. In late October, Han had told a family member that she planned to dissolve her law partnership with Kennedy. “I’m done,” she said. “But this will be worse than a divorce, but I’m going to just get out because I’m sick and tired of Paul.” She said she might take the bar exam in California, where her daughter lived. But she also considered staying in Albuquerque. Twice in early November, once with Kennedy, she took a tour of available office space on Albuquerque’s West Side. The owner asked if Han was looking for space to house the Kennedy & Associates Law firm. She said they would be offices for her alone.

It was after the meeting with her accountant that Han sent the email to Wells Fargo asking to keep her line of credit open. Sometime after 4 p.m. she went to her office for a late meeting with Kennedy and a prospective client. After the meeting, she left the office and drove the 10 minutes home in her BMW 330i.

At 6:25 p.m. she called her sister Liz. They talked, as they usually did, about their day. They discussed Thanksgiving plans. Fifteen minutes into the conversation, Mary interrupted Liz to say that someone was at the door. “I’ll call you back,” she said. She never did.

Thursday, Nov. 18, 2010

Former APD Officer Tom Grover and Mary Han were regular workout partners. They planned to meet that morning at 6 at a local gym. Han never showed up. Her assistant Andrea arrived at the law office around 8 a.m. She was still in training and new to the job. Usually, each morning, Han would text or email her assistant a lengthy and detailed to-do list. Neither arrived that morning. While waiting, Andrea worked on unfinished business. At 10 a.m., Andrea asked Kennedy if he knew where Han was. Kennedy called Han’s cell phone at 11:30 a.m. There was no answer. He left the office and drove to Han’s home.

An unattended death

APD Officers Jacob Welch and Tim Lonz were dispatched to 3022 Colonnade Ct. N.W., a territorial-style townhouse in a cul-de-sac near Rio Grande Boulevard and Candelaria Road Northwest at 12:39 p.m. The call was “in reference to a 52-year-old female in a vehicle in the garage no longer breathing.” Welch was first on the scene minutes after dispatch contacted him.

An Albuquerque Fire Department rescue engine arrived at 12:45. The front door was wide open and the garage door was up. Welch reported finding Kennedy standing in the open garage next to Han’s BMW.

According to police reports, Kennedy told the officers that Han didn’t answer the door when he knocked so he entered the house with a key that he said Han had given him. He called out for Han from the foyer, he told Welch. Hearing no response he walked to the kitchen and through the living room and into the garage where he told police he saw Han sitting in her car.

He told Welch he opened the driver’s-side door of the car and tried to “wake Ms. Han or get a response.” He called 911 and reported an “accidental suicide.” He then opened the garage. Welch checked for vital signs and found none. He noted that the car was turned off and the windows rolled down. Han’s feet were propped up on the dashboard to the left of the steering wheel and her arms were folded and in her lap. She was wearing work-out clothes and reading glasses. The key was in the ignition and a glass of what Lonz reported as “an unknown clear liquid” was on the center console. Welch said it “smelled like vodka.” The glass, however, was not collected into evidence and was never tested. Welch noted that “the vehicle engine was completely cold to the touch and the vehicle also appeared to have a dead battery.”

APD Field Investigator Mike Muniz arrived on the scene along with additional APD officers, sergeants, and commanders. This was the beginning of what would become a parade of APD and City officials and even civilians into and throughout the house and garage. Welch reported that 15 APD personnel, from deputy chiefs to officers, were in the house as well as city officials, and “additional personnel that were not identified” entered the house and garage. Days later Muniz would tell APD Forensics Unit Lt. Brian McCutcheon, who investigated APD’s response, that officers had “lost control of the scene.”

APD officers removed Han’s body from the car and laid her on the concrete garage floor. It took 20 minutes to jump-start the car. When it started Welch noted that the gas tank was half-full and nothing electrical was turned on. Emergency personnel from the fire department concluded it was a “possible crime scene.” They left and turned the scene over to APD.
If the tank was half-full, how had the car shut off? Welch called the local BMW dealership, Sandia BMW, and talked to a technician who told him the vehicle “did not have any built-in safeguards that would automatically shut the vehicle off for running for an extended period.” Welch passed this along to Detective Muniz. Nothing in any of the official police reports answers the question.

A thorn in APD’s side

Han was prominent among civil rights and criminal defense attorneys, but was especially prominent for her success in bringing lawsuits against the Albuquerque Police Department, against which she had won judgments. News of Han’s death began to spread via texts and phone calls among APD officers and officials. Within an hour of Kennedy’s 911 call, every one of APD’s deputy chiefs was on the scene.

Then-City Attorney Rob Perry and Albuquerque Public Safety Director Darren White, who had previously served as director of New Mexico’s Department of Public Safety under Gov. Gary Johnson, arrived at the scene. Some people stood in front of the house with Kennedy and Han’s sister Liz. Some walked into, around and through the house. Muniz put up crime scene tape in order to secure the scene during the investigation, but between 30 and 50 civilians unconnected to APD ducked under the crime scene tape and walked around the house. Muniz later found the tape torn down.

According to Grover, who arrived at the scene with Officer Robbin Burge shortly after the first responders, Deputy Chief Alan Banks, who would later serve as APD’s interim police chief, entered a section of the house at one point and shut out the principal investigating officers. Grover said that action “displaced the principal officers and obviously acted in concert with [APD Commander Paul] Feist to thwart proper processing of the scene.” Sgt. Tim Lopez, who also arrived on the scene after the first responders, would later tell McCutcheon that he found Banks in the house looking through Han’s private legal files, which included an active lawsuit in which Banks was named as a defendant.

Rob Perry, an attorney and a former prisons chief under Gov. Johnson, was friends with Kennedy and Han and once shared office space with them. According to McCutcheon, Kennedy told Perry he wanted Han’s computer. Perry ordered Banks to retrieve it from the BMW. Banks directed APD officer Robbin Burge to walk into the garage in the middle of the investigation, open the trunk, take out Han’s computer and give it to Kennedy. Kennedy eventually left the scene with Han’s computer. McCutcheon described this as an “absolute violation of every APD policy, word-for-word.” Banks retired from APD in January 2014 to become chief of police in Round Rock, Texas, a town north of Austin. I called Banks in Round Rock, leaving a message and asking if he could explain his actions, as reported by other APD officers, on the day of Han’s death. He did not return the call.

Suicide or homicide?

APD Commander Paul Feist walked into the garage with crime lab director Mark Adams while Muniz and a medical examiner were taking photographs of the body and the car. Feist had 20 years experience in the criminalistics unit. McCutcheon described Feist as someone who “literally wrote the book on crime scene investigation,” telling me, “If you were at a crime scene you wanted Feist there. He did things by the book. He always took the extra step. And yet on this case he violated every standard operating procedure,” McCutcheon said.

According to McCutcheon, a field investigator at the scene of a possible suicide or accidental death should determine “if it’s immediately obvious it’s a suicide.” Is there a suicide note? An eyewitness? Lacking that, he said, an unattended death should be investigated as a possible homicide. The BMW technician could not explain why the car had shut off. There were no eyewitnesses to her death and no one found a suicide note. Sgt. Mike Meisinger told Grover and other officers on the scene to prepare to investigate the death as a homicide. Feist put an end to these plans. According to McCutcheon, Feist looked quickly around the garage and told Muniz to stop taking photographs. “This is a suicide,” he said. “Let’s get this done quick.”

In a nine-sentence supplemental report filed more than four months later, Feist wrote, “I learned that the victim was located inside her vehicle inside the garage and the death was possibly a suicide.” His report does not explain how he learned this.
Despite the fact that first responders found Han’s front door and garage wide open when they arrived on the scene, Mark Adams filed a late supplemental report as well, writing “[Commander Feist and I] were told the scene was consistent with a suicide scene being that the residence was locked and the victim was sitting inside a vehicle in the garage.” After telling Muniz to stop taking photos, Feist told Welch and Lonz not to canvass the neighborhood.

One of McCutcheon’s criminalistics sergeants, Keith Johnson, was at a conference when he got a text about Han’s death. Johnson got up to leave the conference in order to join the investigation. Feist contacted him to say he wasn’t needed.
Han’s cell phone was not recovered at the scene. Weeks later, Kennedy returned it to Han’s sister. The phone’s data had been deleted. A second laptop was in the house on the day Han died. A few days later Han’s family noted that it was missing. There were no signs of forced entry.

A few months after her death, Mary Han’s family reported that two diamond rings were missing. When McCutcheon told Feist that APD should investigate, Feist reportedly told him, “We don’t know if on the day before she died she didn’t give those diamonds to some transient on the street.”

The New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator found that Han died with a carbon monoxide saturation in her system of 84.8 percent. According to Forensics Unit investigators, most saturation levels in suicides by carbon monoxide poisoning are in the 30 to 40 percent range. McCutcheon was unable to locate a single suicide case by carbon monoxide poisoning with levels as high as Han’s.

Despite these discrepancies, the OMI ruled Han’s death a suicide. When McCutcheon called to ask how they arrived at that determination, he was told the determination was based partly on a call made by Paul Feist to the OMI in which Feist said that Han was depressed at the time of her death.

Feist also called the crime lab and told the photo manager to personally call him with the name of anyone who requested access to any of the photos from the scene. I asked McCutcheon why Feist would make such an order. He told me, “It’s not uncommon in an officer-involved shooting, but I’ve never seen it done for a suicide.”

I reached Feist by telephone seeking to clarify his role in the investigation and to ask questions based on other officers’ accounts of his actions at Han’s home that day. He cut off my questions and said only, “I’m not going to comment at all on this story.” Feist is no longer with APD. He now works as a hearing officer at the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy in Santa Fe.

I repeatedly left phone messages for Kennedy – through his law office number, a cell phone number that another lawyer told me was his, and to a second office number – telling him I had questions about his actions the day he said he found Han’s body. I left a message with one of his office staff outlining in detail the nature of my inquiry. Kennedy did not return the calls.

A year after Han’s death, Rosario Vega Lynn, an Albuquerque attorney representing Mary Han’s estate, arranged to have the BMW 330i tested to find out why it had turned off. On two separate occasions in the fall of 2011, McCutcheon, by then retired from APD, and another technician placed the car in an enclosed trailer with a tank full of gas and a carbon monoxide monitor. With cameras running, they sat around a video display and a bucket of chicken and waited. They were long nights. The car never shut off. On both occasions it ran until it was out of gas. In both tests, in a trailer three-times smaller than Han’s garage, it took nearly four hours to achieve fatal levels of carbon monoxide.

Han’s family sued the City of Albuquerque claiming that APD “hindered, obstructed, and defeated the due course of justice with the intent to deny Plaintiffs equal protection under the law.” A judge dismissed their claim. In a move that has generated controversy in the city’s legal community, the City is now suing Mary Han’s family to recoup its legal costs in the lawsuit. That case, and an appeal of the dismissal, is pending.

Regardless of the outcome of the legal cases, it would be difficult now to investigate Han’s death as a possible homicide, or even prove a suicide. Evidence is missing. The scene was unsecured. Many of the people at the scene were not interviewed.

“When I realized what happened at that house,” McCutcheon told me, “the hair stood up on the back of my neck. One of two things happened that day. Either it was an absolute case of total incompetence by everyone involved, or it was cover-up. Those are the only two possibilities.”

This essay first appeared in the ABQ Free Press