Recently, we had the privilege of speaking with Captain Joe Evans of the Wichita Fire Department – whose career with the fire department spans a whopping 27 years – and he was one of the most genuine, down-to-earth, humble, and open-hearted people we’ve ever interviewed. And that’s the short list of positive adjectives we could use to describe him.
Part 1 of this interview was dedicated solely to Joe’s professional life. In Part 2 things get personal. Joe shares stories from his life that range from heartbreaking to harrowing. You will also learn about the one fire investigation that haunts him to this day.
Let’s jump back in…
Kristee: Were there any challenges unique to fire department evidence management that you didn’t anticipate, when you started getting serious about your evidence management?
Joe: Since we switched to FileOnQ, it’s made things so much easier. The guys are so much happier now than the way we used to do it.
Our evidence room was a mess; an absolute mess. In the beginning, when we started logging evidence, that was not fun. Because I made the decision to take every bit of evidence that we have in here, and log it into the system. We’re going to bar code it. We’re going to do it all.
And that was a lengthy process, because we were trying to do it in between investigating fire scenes and doing all the other stuff that we’ve got to do.
We’re still not completely finished with that. We’ve had it for over a year now. We’re still working on it, but we’re really close to getting that all finished out. That was the biggest challenge for us getting everything in there.
Kristee: I was a civilian property and evidence manager. We had about 3,500 pieces of property – we were pen and paper too – and it took me about four months. So trying to do your job and barcode everything you have… I can’t even imagine.
Joe: For any fatality or homicide evidence that we deal with, we’ve got to keep that forever.
We don’t ever get rid of it.
Kristee: You should send that evidence to the police department. Let them store it.
Joe: That’s actually not a bad idea, but see the problem is if we transfer that to the police department, we can’t track it. That’s why I wish the police department would switch to FileOnQ.
I really wish they would because I had to log evidence into the system they have now and before, and I had to go over to the police department’s property and evidence to do it – we have access because we have law enforcement powers – so I went to the police department’s Officer Turn In to log this stuff in. And I was like, never again will I do this.
Kristee: Maybe I’ll send pieces of this interview to their department and they’ll read it and be like, Whoa, let’s check it out.
Joe: I really wish they would. I think they would love it. Of course, you know, with any city government, it’s all about money and whatnot. But I tell you what, using EvidenceOnQ it’s way better than the way our police department has to log evidence in my opinion.
Kristee: Has managing evidence changed your perspective on its importance in fire investigations?
Joe: It got to a point where it’s almost like you didn’t want to collect evidence anymore before we got EvidenceOnQ here, because it was such a pain. Before, we’d have to come in, write information on a sheet, throw it in a three-ring binder, and then put it up on a shelf.
We have so much evidence…if you needed something, you had to go search for it and search for it and search for it. And you had no idea what shelf it was on. And now everything’s barcoded and shelves are labeled. It’s so much better now and the guys are taking in more evidence now because it’s so much easier to log it in.
Kristee: Let’s see, what’s one piece of advice that you would give someone taking over an evidence management role for the first time?
Joe: So obviously, make sure you have the proper training, which FileOnQ provided and it’s been great.
The training we have with Bruce – getting us all set up on things – it was a process, I’m not going to lie, it was a process, but that’s fine. I can’t remember how many training sessions we had, but it was quite a few. Bruce has been so easy to work with. The whole company has been easy to work with, even when I’ve had issues. The main issue that we’ve had since getting the system has nothing to do with FileOnQ; it was our barcode scanner losing connection.
So having the proper training makes a big difference. Once you have the training, and the more you use the system, the more comfortable you get with it. Now it’s nothing to go in there to log something in and put it on a shelf.
Kristee: Now, I’d like to get a little bit of info about personal life. Do you have a family?
Joe: Technically, I’ve got three kids. Back in February of 2023, my wife passed away from brain cancer. She had a daughter prior to us getting married. She’s 21 now, so she’s grown up. She’s graduated college and moved out on her own. And then together, we had a son and a daughter. My daughter just turned 11 on February 11th. And my son will turn 15 on April 15 – tax day of all days.
My focus now is on them. With the captain’s role that I have now, I’m able to do a lot more from home. Our schedule is unique in a way. We work a 40-hour week. Every night from 8 p.m. to midnight, the oncoming investigators are on call. Our shift technically starts at midnight and runs until 8 p.m., so we work 20-hour shifts. The nice thing about that is the time off you get in between shifts.
So technically, it adds up to about four days off in between. So you’re working two days a week, just 20 hours at a time. It’s really nice.
The guys on the floor in operations at our fire department work 24 hours on, 48 hours off. That’s what I worked before I went into investigations. It’s something you get used to. It just becomes the norm. From midnight until about seven in the morning, we can sleep during that time frame, as long as we don’t have fires. Usually, from seven o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night you’re working.
It all depends on the day… You may have no fires, so you’re able to get a lot of office stuff done. On a different day you may have three or four fires. Typically with fire investigations, you’ll be on scene anywhere from one to three hours. Then you’ve got to come back and deal with all the paperwork and stuff.
Getting back to me and my personal life…. I’m just focusing on the kids. I guess if I had a hobby it would be fishing. My in-laws live down in Missouri at Table Rock Lake. So we’ll go down there two or three times a year and spend a week or so there. The kids can have fun, swim, and do whatever.
Kristee: Do your kids play sports or musical instruments?
Joe: My son was playing baseball. He’s a freshman this year, in high school, and was talking about trying out for the baseball team. Hopefully, he sticks with that. He also plays the violin with the orchestra. When he told us that he wanted to do it, I was kind of surprised. He started playing in the fifth grade and he stuck with it. He enjoys it.
My daughter started intermediate school this year. She’s in fifth grade and she wanted to play the violin, so being that my son is in high school I bought him a brand new violin and just handed down his to her. She also seems like it. We’ll see if she sticks with it. She also plays softball as well.
Kristee: I have one last question that you can answer… or not answer if it’s too hard to think about. Has there been one incident that has lingered with you —haunted you—in all of your years of doing this?
Joe: Yes. I was in investigations at that time. In 2009, we had a house fire down in South Wichita. It was in a mobile home. The victim was a young, 10-year-old girl. She had been burned.
When I got there, she was across the street in another mobile home – EMS and Fire Crews were dealing with her. I never did get to see her because there was so much going on.
During the investigation, I had the Fire Marshall go to the hospital to try and interview her and the EMS crew to see if she made any statements about what happened. Because the fire originated in her bedroom. There were bunk beds in that room, and her younger sister slept in that bedroom.
The fire marshal called me up and said, The patient stated to the EMS… she kept repeating over and over… the lamp and the lamp.
Well, that kind of clued me in… maybe we had an issue with the lamp. Maybe it shorted out. And I knew… We’ve got to go there. Mobile homes are built differently than a normal home. It was really burned up in there. The floor had holes in it. I mean, the room was really, really burned up.
In subsequent interviews with the mother and stepfather, I’d ask about the lamp. Was there a lamp in the room?
Yeah, there was a lamp in the room. We had bought it at a flea market. Okay, that doesn’t really mean much. We still had to find the lamp and figure out if it was even the cause. At the time, we had no reason to suspect that there was anything else going on.
We left the scene and went to the hospital to interview the mother and stepfather. When we got up to the burn unit in the waiting room, I noticed that the stepfather wasn’t there. So I asked the mother, where is your husband? She said, “He doesn’t like hospitals.”
My partner at the time, who was actually an ex-police officer, he transferred from the police department to the fire department and got into investigations. I’ve known him and his family for years – ever since high school. We both left there and thought that’s really odd.
As a stepfather myself, I’d be at that hospital. I don’t care how scared I was of hospitals. So we had an issue with that.
The Wichita Police Department’s Missing and Exploited Children’s Unit (EMCU) brought in the little sister for an interview. After interviewing her, they interviewed the mother and the stepfather.
To make a long story short, the stepfather had been sexually abusing the girl for years.
That morning he went in while she and her younger sister were both still asleep. He took the younger one – his biological daughter – off the bunk and laid her down on the couch in the living room.
During the interview, the detectives thought, Why did he take her to the couch?
The younger sister said, “He came in and put me on the couch and then went back into the bedroom.”
When he went back into the bedroom, he raped her, doused her in lighter fluid and then… set her on fire.
I don’t know how she lived. She was burned very, very badly. I think she had like 40% – 60% of her body burned – third-degree burns. Typically, people that are burned that badly don’t make it. They don’t survive. And she did somehow.
He was arrested and charged with a slew of charges. The wife was even arrested because she knew that the abuse was going on and she did nothing about it. That’s one case that’s always haunted me because here we are searching for a lamp that had nothing to do with anything. Lo and behold, this is where it ended up.
And it’s like…Good Lord… It’s not that we missed it. It’s just, you would never think like that. And that’s where working with the police department comes in very handy.
The Exploited and Missing Children’s Unit deals with kids and abuse all the time. They specialized in it. They brought in a psychologist to help out and talk with victims. It made all the difference in the world interviewing the younger sister. She basically opened it all up.
Kristee: It sounds like stepdad was hoping to get rid of the stepdaughter so she couldn’t talk. That’s so sad and sick.
Joe: I don’t know if it’s just because she was getting older and he was afraid that she was going to say something to somebody. After interviewing him, he confessed everything. He was sentenced to life in prison plus 165 months for arson charges. He will not be eligible for parole until 2047.
That’s the one case that has always stuck with me because we never expected that.
Kristee: Of course you never would. I mean, if you don’t think that way…
Joe: And like I said, mobile homes are constructed differently. So if I had seen that type of damage in a regular house, I might have thought, Okay, maybe we’ve got an ignitable liquid working here.
But mobile homes are built with thin wood, so they burn easier and faster.. If you have a fire in a mobile home, chances are you’re going to have holes in the floor—holes everywhere. The floors are going to be spongy because the floor trusses are different. You know, it’s the way it’s built. It can be deceiving.
Kristee: Did somebody pull her out before you got there?
Joe: I can’t remember exactly. After he set her on fire, I think she came running out. I can’t remember exactly how that all went down. Luckily, she was able to get out of there and I was absolutely amazed that she lived. I think the only reason that she may have lived was because she was young.
But she had a long, long road to recovery.
Kristee: I don’t know how that little girl will ever trust anybody in her life. I mean, to go from being sexually abused regularly to literally being burned alive? Sometimes I don’t understand the way the cards are dealt in life.
Joe: I know what you mean. I’ve worked several homicides involving fire and that one is something that’ll stick with me until I die.
Kristee: I can understand why. It’s a horrific case. Well Joe, you’ve been a great interviewee. Thank you so much for joining us today. And, of course, thank you for your service.
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