MENA ROOMMATE: I NEVER HEARD SHOUTS OF 'POLICE!'

Feb. 26 - The four SWAT officers told investigators they repeatedly shouted
"Police!" and "Policia!" from the moment they crashed into the house where
Ismael Mena lived.

But Mena's roommate, Antonio Hernandez, said that when masked men crashed
into his tiny room, pointed a gun at his head and handcuffed him, he thought
he was about to die.

And he never heard them say they were police. Not until the gunfire erupted.
That's when the 45-year-old Mena, a father of nine and worker at a local
bottling company, was fatally gunned down.

"I just thought they were thieves," Hernandez told police during a 15-minute
videotaped interview about an hour and a half after Mena was killed. "I
thought they were going to kill me," Hernandez said in Spanish to a Denver
police detective. "Then when I found out they were police, I knew they
wouldn't kill me."

Hernandez's taped interview and video interviews of four SWAT team members
who conducted the deadly raid on Sept. 29 were released Friday by Jefferson
County District Attorney Dave Thomas after open-records requests by The
Denver Post and other media. All the interviews were conducted by Denver
police investigators in the hours after Mena was killed.

Thomas also made available more than 500 pages of records that helped him
determine that police had acted within the law when they shot Mena eight
times during the midday no-knock raid.

Thomas did file felony perjury charges against Officer Joseph Bini, whose
warrant request caused the raid. Records show Bini was one of several
officers to search the house on High Street in Denver's northeast section
after the raid. Nothing illicit was found.

The four police officers who were interviewed - Capt. Vincent DiManna, Sgt.
Anthony Iacovetta, and technicians Ken Overman and Mark Haney - gave
substantially the same account to investigators. They all saw a man with a
gun hiding behind a bedroom door and, despite their commands for him to drop
it and persistent shouts that they were the police, he didn't.

But the interviews and records leave a few things unanswered in addition to
Hernandez's difference in recollection and give an insight into how Denver
police handled the raid.

Among them:

Haney said he guessed where Mena was behind a hallway wall and fired two
shots. There was no indication from any officer whether they believed that
Mena was in the room alone. Records and interviews show two toddlers also
lived in the house.

Overman urged DiManna to allow him to join the raid with his submachine gun.
Overman admitted that his first shot - at Mena's head - was intended "to end
the threat." DiManna quoted Overman as saying: "Cap, move out and we'll get
a sub gun up there."

Only DiManna said he recalled hearing Mena question whether it was the
police who kicked in his door.

"It was my feeling, as long as this was taking, that this subject was
possibly agreeing that it was the police and that he might be putting the
weapon down," DiManna said.

Ballistic reports couldn't match the two recovered slugs - one was never
recovered - with Mena's gun, nor did they find any fingerprints on the
.22-caliber Burgo that police said they found in Mena's hand. The gun, made
in 1965, also was missing an important piece that helps keep the cylinder
from falling out.