Daniel Brandt Jr., the 17-year-old convicted of attempted first degree murder in the Oct. 2022 shooting of Alamosa Police Officer Mollee Heeney and local Ricardo Rangel, was sentenced to 40 years in the Department of Corrections on Friday.
Alamosa City Councilor Michael Carson, who spoke to the court on behalf of Brandt’s character, said afterward that District Court Judge Crista Newmyer-Olsen said, “This sucks.”
“This may in fact, I suspect, be the most difficult sentencing hearing I will probably have in my career,” she said.
For the counts of attempted first degree murder, first degree assault of a peace officer, and first degree assault of Heeney, Brandt was sentenced to 24 years to serve each count concurrently. For the counts of attempted first degree murder and first degree assault of Rangel, he was sentenced to 16 years to also serve each count concurrently. He will serve both sentences consecutively for a total of 40 years. He also received a sentence of 5 years of mandatory parole.
In Colorado, those in the department of corrections will receive a “day for day” compensation of their time as well as time credited for good behavior. Brandt has the possibility of parole after serving a third of his time, which is approximately 17 years.
In a statement to Alamosa Citizen, District Attorney Anne Kelly said, “This represents a just sentence considering the trauma this event caused to our community and to our law enforcement officers as a whole. The victims in this case, Ricardo Rangel and officer Mollee Heeney, will never be healed from this trauma both physically and emotionally, but this gives them a sense of justice. The judge was very measured and appropriate in her analysis and I appreciate the hard work she did to make this hard decision.”
Earlier in the day, Kelly noted that sentencing is particularly difficult because Brandt was 15 at the time of the shooting and 17 now.
“This is a day I’ve been dreading for sometime,” she said.
Nemyer-Olsen, before imposing a sentence on Brandt, summarized her findings, thoughts, and the basis for her sentence.
“I believe he absolutely is redeemable,” Newmyer-Olsen told the court, which was filled with friends and family of Brandt’s. “I believe he is absolutely capable of processing and addressing his trauma and moving forward with his life. I do not think he is someone who is simply evil or without value as a human being.”
She said her feelings would be different if she were addressing a 30-year-old who had committed the same acts.
“You are valuable and you are redeemable,” she told Brandt.
Both Kelly and Brandt’s counsel Cobea Becker made sentence arguments in the first part of the day, which involved written statements and expert testimonies. Both offered reasons for handing down a harsher sentence and mitigating a harsher sentence.
Kelly, despite finding the day to be a difficult one, asked for the maximum possible sentence of 96 years, which is 48 years each for the two counts of attempted first degree murder.
The defense argued that 96 years was not proportional to Brandt’s crime. Becker asked the judge to consider 28 years.
Kelly read statements from Rangel and Heeney, who said that their lives forever changed on October 27, 2022. Rangel wrote in his statement that it was a day where he “almost lost it all” and that Brandt’s actions “cost me a sense of normalcy.”
Heeney’s statement addressed her physical recovery, noting that she is not fully recovered and may never be. Her femur was shattered in at least 13 pieces and is held together with rods and screws. There are bullet fragments still lodged in her femur and a bullet in her shoulder, she wrote. “I may not have lost my life, but I lost a lot.”
Former Alamosa Police Chief Ken Anderson stood in front of the judge and shared his thoughts.
“This happened on my watch,” he said. He oversaw Heeney’s progress through the police academy and as one of his officers.
He said that it was a sad day for the community and that he did have a lot of anger, which he expressed. Anderson said that it was a “shame to see something like this happen” and couldn’t “understand or contemplate” how it came to happen two years ago.
Anderson called Brandt’s actions “unfathomable” and “beyond rehabilitation.” As he finished addressing the court, he said, “You need God, son.”
Before Newmyer-Olsen handed down her sentence, Brandt stood up and addressed the court, for the first time since Oct. 2022.
“I would like to say that I do recognize that my actions have severely impacted the community. I did some pretty terrible things. There’s gonna be consequences for my actions. I just want to apologize to the community for the harm that I’ve done…. I know it’s been tough for everybody. It’s been really hard these past few years to move forward.”