Enclave on edge as mystery persists in mansion fire, deaths

COLTS NECK, N.J. >> When a landscaper alerted Boris Volshteyn to smoke pouring out of a nearby mansion, the plastic surgeon hurried home and found his friend and neighbor lying face down out front. His first thought was to try CPR, but it was no use.

Keith Caneiro, a 50-year-old technology executive, had been shot in the head.

Hopes that Caneiro’s wife and two young children weren’t inside as the inferno raged from early afternoon the Tuesday before Thanksgiving until at least midnight were dashed when they failed to turn up elsewhere. Friends who had gathered outside called the children’s school and Jennifer Caneiro’s cellphone.

“When the kids were not in school, and Jennifer was not answering, it all became a grim picture,” Volshteyn told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “To the very last minute, all the neighbors were hoping that the kids

were spared.”

As they puzzled over the bizarre crime in pastoral Colts Neck, a wealthy enclave for horse breeders, hedge fund managers and celebrities near the northern New Jersey coast, Caneiro’s business partner and brother, Paul, was charged with setting his own family home on fire earlier the same day.

But no one has been charged yet in the Colts Neck slayings, Paul Caneiro was seen elsewhere during the fire there, and authorities have not said how the other family members died.