Woman shot, killed by deputies was no drug dealer, family and friends say

By Mike Clary, Sun Sentinel
Mar. 15, 2010

POMPANO BEACH In front of the house where she lived for 27 years, Brenda Van Zwieten was eulogized Sunday as a community activist and big-hearted surrogate mother to neighbohood youth — and an unlikely candidate to brandish a loaded weapon at deputies.

"Look at these people here," said Bill George, Van Zwieten's brother, indicating dozens of people who gathered in the yard near a flower-bedecked cross put up to memorialize the 52-year-old grandmother. "She helped so many of these young people."

"She was like a second mom to me," said Michael Miller, 18. "She would take in anybody."

But Broward Sheriff's Office deputies said that Van Zwieten failed to obey orders to drop a .357-caliber Magnum handgun after they burst into the house just after midnight Saturday in what they described as a raid on a suspected drug den at 301 SW 18th Court.

In a news conference Saturday, Sheriff Al Lamberti said deputies stormed the house after complaints from neighbors.

Lamberti said deputies announced their presence to Van Zwieten several times after entering the house by smashing through a sliding glass door into a bedroom and taking into custody her boyfriend, Gary Nunnemacher, 47. The Sheriff's Office said he surrendered without resistance.

Van Zwieten, the only other person in the house, was shot and killed moments later in another bedroom, police said.

"There was no reason for this," said son Rob Singleton, 32.

Van Zwieten had no criminal history involving drugs or violence, state records show.

But deputies said they took from the home 324 grams of marijuana, 4 grams of crack cocaine, 1 gram of heroin, six marijuana plants, 40 tablets of the anti-anxiety medication alprazolam, $550 in cash, two shotguns and one rifle.

Also seized was the .357-caliber Magnum handgun that Lamberti said Van Zwieten refused to put down.

Van Zwieten did have reason to be afraid, George said, after she was threatened recently by a man accused of stealing jewelry from the house. The watches and rings were part of a bedroom shrine to two of Van Zwieten's four sons, who died within the past three years. One was killed in a traffic crash; another died after a drug overdose.

Van Zwieten had installed an alarm system just last week, said George. "She was scared."

George, Singleton and other family members said Van Zwieten had a license for the gun, but usually kept it in a hall closet and not in her bedroom.

On Sunday afternoon her small bedroom bore the grisly evidence of the early Saturday morning raid. A large puddle of blood still looked wet on the floor, and on the walls and ceiling Singleton pointed out what he said was splatter from his mother's head.

"She was probably running into the closet and trying to hide," he said.

Sheriff's Office officials have not said how many times deputies fired their weapons. As is routine, two unidentified deputies involved in the shooting were placed on paid administrative leave while the investigation continues.

Much of the interior of the three-bedroom house looked as if it had been hit by a tornado, the aftermath of the police search, said Singleton. Drawers were pulled from dressers, clothes were scattered, a bed was overturned, food and crockery had been knocked from kitchen cabinets.

The shrine to her dead sons, Brian and Zach, was also torn apart, Singleton said.

Singleton said his mother took several medications, and produced prescription receipts for alprazolam and oxycodone. But he and many others who gathered at the house through the afternoon Sunday insisted that Van Zwieten was no drug dealer.

Instead, family members said, Van Zwieten had been active in the PTA at McNab Elementary School, volunteered on political campaigns, and in 1996 worked to set aside a 12-acre parcel that is now a city nature preserve.

"I grew up in foster care, and she was like the mother I never had," said Nicole Scalesse, 25, who has two children, Brian, 2, and Shyanne, 15 months, with Rob Singleton. "Do you think I would leave my children here with her if she sold drugs?"

Arrested on a misdemeanor marijuana charge, Nunnemacher was freed from jail late Saturday on $100 bond, family members said. Nunnemacher was at the house Sunday, but declined to speak to a reporter.

Three others were arrested blocks from the house Friday night before the raid took place, deputies said. They were Chaylenne Pallazzo, 21, and Patrick Banks, 18, both of Pompano Beach, and Jorge Lopez, 23, who is homeless.

Singleton said he did not know those three people.