Shantel Rivas lowered her sleeping children into the bathtub to keep them safe from stray bullets as a tense hostage standoff played out in an apartment below.
Rivas, 28, was spending a quiet evening with her husband, Matt, and two children when she heard what she believed was a fight outside her window.
She stepped onto the balcony about 6:30 p.m. Tuesday and found a police officer taking cover behind a nearby car, asking someone she couldn’t see for the apartment’s address.
“I poked my head out to tell him the address, and he said: ‘Go back in the house.’ I went in, and we turned on the TV, and we heard about it on the news,” she said Wednesday.
Within hours, the man who held a family hostage after barging into the apartment below hers was dead of a self-inflicted gunshot.
“He took the final resolution,” said Lt. Ron Saunier, spokesman for the Denver Police Department.
Police identified the man as Steven Garrett Stewart, 39, who had a lengthy criminal record.
On Wednesday, the windows and door of a unit in the Peachtree Apartments, 3550 S. Kendall St., were covered with plywood.
Light fixtures in the hallway were exposed, the bulbs dangling from wires where police had disabled them to keep the area dark.
Shantel Rivas said five people live in the apartment below hers in the sprawling southwest Denver complex: an older man and woman, a woman she believes is their daughter and the older couple’s two grandchildren.
During the evening Tuesday, she said, a negotiating team communicated with the suspect, trying to persuade him to come out.
At one point, Rivas said: “I saw the grandpa run out toward the cops, and they took him away.” Later, she heard police calling on those in the house to come out.
Some of the family came out through a window. The older woman remained in the house, hostage to the gunman as hours ticked by, police said.
“Hours went by. I was afraid for my own life and my kids,” Rivas said of her children, Santina, 1, and Ray, 6. “After they fell asleep, I put them in the bathtub because I thought that was the safest place.”
Her husband sat near the door, a butcher knife in hand in case the gunman attempted to break in. He heard glass breaking and shouting.
SWAT officers freed the female hostage about 10:15 p.m. Tuesday.
About 10:30 p.m., officers came to the Rivases’ apartment and evacuated the family, bringing them to a police car nearby.
Saunier said that police fired gas at the apartment after midnight, and when they rushed the unit, they found the suspect dead.
Police later took the Rivas family to the home of Shantel Rivas’ father nearby. “At first, I was like, this ain’t happening,” said Jerry Chavez, 46, Shantel’s father. “It was kind of scary with those kids in there.”
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
