Watch our discussion with Mears in the video at the top of this report.
The brother of the man who died in a garage fire in Milwaukee this month has said he hopes the death doesn't remain a mystery.
TMJ4's Bruce Harrison spoke with Gene Mears, the half-brother of Grant Forbes. Forbes died in a fire near 26th and Greenfield on Jan. 3, but firefighters didn't discover his body.
It was only the next day on Jan. 4 that a cleaning crew found Forbes' body in the garage.
According to the Milwaukee Fire Department, the body's discovery was "nearly impossible given the extreme hoarder conditions throughout the building."
On Wednesday, when we asked about the conditions his half-brother was living in, Mears said he was both surprised and not.
"I’m not happy with the conditions that he died in. But I understand his living that way," Mears explained. "They’re saying things [like] he was a hoarder. To know a hoarder is to know that you always want things that you never had when you were growing up, and you were always afraid somebody was going to take it away from you."
When asked what's next, Mears, who lives in Texas, said he wants someone to be held accountable.
"That’s a terrible thing to think of my brother laying here. And it’s cold up there [in Wisconsin]. All that water sprayed up there on the fire. My brother was supposedly in his underwear."
Harrison asked Milwaukee Fire Chief Aaron Lipski about what happened that day and how he's defending that the body was overlooked.
"There is no reasonable expectation looking at the wall of tightly packed, interlocked, random junk that a person would be inside that pile of junk," said Lipski.
Lipski said firefighters conducted multiple searches, followed by both the fire investigation unit and the police arson unit. The garage was packed with random items nearly floor to ceiling.
"This was among the worst hoarder situations I've seen," said Lipski. "It was just one massive sea of wall-to-wall junk. We're basically walking into a junkyard that happened to have walls around it."
Lipski said that firefighters were told by people at the scene that someone was inside. The medical examiner's report notes that a health inspector heard someone shouting.
But the fire department, Lipski said, also had reason to believe anyone inside had left. He explained that a reported barrier of junk near an entrance was no longer standing when firefighters entered.
"This is a serious matter. If this was our miss, if we through commission or omission, failed in our duty to find this individual, that's a big deal for us," he said. "And if we're wrong, we'll say we're wrong."
Lipski also said there are varying reports about whether or not the property owner knew anyone was living there.
"It's changing information, and that's very difficult to parse through to find out what the actual truth is," said Lipski.
TMJ4 contacted the owner, S2 Real Estate, the day after Forbes was discovered. They said they didn't know about anyone living there. But according to the medical examiner's report, an owner identified the man and said he was allowed to live there.
TMJ4 again reached out to S2 this week with questions about Forbes and the conditions of the garage. They confirmed they knew about our inquiry but have yet to respond.
Lipski said the cause of the fire is undetermined but they strongly believe it was intentional.
At a press conference on Wednesday evening — separate from our conversation with Lipski — the chief said they are going to review their standard operating guidelines to respond to hoarder conditions.
"The more this goes, the worse each individual hoarding condition gets," he said.
Police Chief Jeffrey Norman also spoke at the press conference. He said Forbes' death is still an open investigation and the cause of death is undetermined.
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