by Edward Humes
Once enough settlers were lured by its charming and fertile grasslands, the rancho evolved into a town in its own right. They rechristened the rancho “Bell,” named for the richest among them, James Bell, who donated land for the town’s first church and first school. Explosive growth arrived in the prewar era, putting Bell on the map as a desirable suburb instead of a scattering of homes in the countryside. The community’s economy boomed even as it denuded itself of the pastures and groves that were once its residents’ pride and joy. Then came the era of relentless and unchecked building in the empty spaces between Southern California’s towns—the creation of modern Los Angeles’s infamous sprawl. This “in-fill” reached the borders of Bell in the sixties, then enveloped the town like a concrete tide, until only the illusion of a separate place existed in the form of marks on a map. Bell became one of a slew of decaying municipal islands embedded in the asphalt archipelago that is Greater Los Angeles.
By 1989, the city of Bell had become a griddle-flat two-and-a-half square miles of potholed, oven-baked concrete, chronically clogged freeway interchanges, half-vacant strip malls, and dilapidated rental homes. It was well on its way to becoming what it is today: one of the poorest communities in the Los Angeles Basin, its treasury looted by the corrupt denizens of city hall, who enriched themselves with tax dollars even as one out of every six residents slipped below the poverty line. This was the Bell that greeted the Parks family in April 1989—the Bell where a converted garage apartment, poorly maintained on its weedy back lot, with three tiny bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, and bathroom somehow crammed into 528 square feet, would soon burn to the ground.
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As Bob Robison rushed into the burning building, another neighbor raced to help, climbing over the wall in back, then running along the flaming north side of the apartment, garden hose in hand. This first responder was neither police officer nor firefighter. He was a determined teenager from the neighborhood—in a tuxedo.
They called him Tuxedo Man after this night. Nineteen-year-old David Haney had just returned from a formal, still wearing his classic black tux, when he spotted the garish aura of the fire from a friend’s house several blocks away. Fearing an elderly friend of the family might be the victim of the fire—the friend, it turned out, lived next door to the Parks apartment—Haney had cut through multiple neighbors’ backyards, hopping wall after wall. As he approached the Parkses’ place, Haney snatched a hose from next door, dragged it over, and began pouring water through the living room windows, which had already shattered by the time he arrived. He noticed that smoke and flames were coming through the north-facing windows of a back bedroom, too: little Ronnie’s room. Haney, a lifelong resident of Sherman Way who lived five houses up the street, knew the Parks apartment well; the previous tenants had been his friends. As he scaled the block wall and dropped into the Parkses’ tiny backyard, he saw no sign of flames in the other back bedroom that the two Parks girls shared. Haney would later recall arriving at the burning apartment just as the 911 operator was finishing with Shirley Robison’s call.
Haney found the heat so intense he couldn’t stand closer than ten feet from the house. The puny garden hose spray seemed to do nothing. The house, he’d later recall, was already an inferno by the time he got there. He used the word engulfed.
From inside the house, Haney heard what sounded like screams—the faint sound of children crying out for help. Despite the waves of heat radiating from the house, those small voices made him shiver. For weeks after that night, just thinking about it could make him weep, so determined had he been to save those kids.
Haney forced himself to stand closer to the house, trying to get more water in through the windows. But there was no way he could knock down the flames with a garden hose’s feeble flow, much less do what he longed to do: wet things down enough to allow him to climb inside a shattered window. Then he could track down the source of those screams and carry the kids to safety.
It was not to be. Nothing Haney tried had any effect on the mounting ferocity of the flames. His tuxedo began to smolder, suddenly painful on his skin, and he had to douse himself with the hose in order to continue trying to fight the fire. Steam rose from his outfit, the black cloth drying almost immediately. This forced him to spray himself again, then again. Through the smoke and steam enveloping him, he could hear a woman’s voice crying and calling out repeatedly from the driveway: “My kids are in there.”
When a house burns, the ravaged rooms and furniture do not come with handy time stamps. Reconstructing the sequence of events, the start and progress of a fire, can be difficult, even impossible, for investigators poking through the ruins. Tuxedo Man’s recollections could have helped, suggesting, among other things, that the girls’ bedroom became engulfed later than other parts of the building, and that at least one and possibly all three children were still alive at the time of the 911 call. Yet, as investigators pondered what happened that night, Haney’s information began to undermine the official version. Eventually one of the first people to arrive on the scene would be dropped as a witness.
Despite the hour, a crowd began gathering at the curb, drawn by the overpowering smell of smoke and by what appeared from a distance to be a gigantic torch lighting the darkness. This night also brought the first cool weather after a weeklong April heat wave in which temperatures had topped 100 degrees. Now they had mercifully dipped to the low sixties, though across the street from the burning apartment it felt as if the heat wave had never ended. As neighbors drew close enough and became spectators, the giant “torch” they had seen shining into their windows resolved into the towering old orange tree that rose between the Robisons’ house and the garage apartment in back. The massive tree bore thousands of pieces of fruit. Now those oranges were turning black and dropping from branches wreathed in fire.
Bob Robison, meanwhile, had reappeared on the apartment patio, doubled over with deep, hoarse coughs. Parks and his wife rushed to him, helping him stagger away from the heat. He had barely escaped the flame and smoke by crawling to the door. The fire had spread quickly into the master bedroom after Parks fled, he said, and he couldn’t get farther into the house. Just before he got out, he thought he saw the air and smoke begin to spark and flash around him. Parks peppered him with questions about her children, but he only shook his head.
“I didn’t see the kids,” he gasped between coughs. “I couldn’t get very far. Too hot. Too much smoke.” Then he stooped, groaned, and picked up his own garden hose.
Moments later, the wail of sirens turned all heads toward the street. The wait for emergency vehicles to arrive had seemed agonizingly long, but in truth the first three police cars arrived within three minutes of the 911 call at 12:25 A.M. The city of Bell’s tiny proportions became an asset then. Its quaint redbrick police headquarters and fire station were just a few blocks from the burning apartment.
Parks ran to the curb to wave in the police cruisers, crying out to the officers what their dispatcher had already told them: Her three children were still trapped in the back rooms. They ran up the driveway to look for a way into the house to attempt a rescue.
One officer commandeered the garden hose Robison had just picked up and told him to go to safety. Another did the same with Tuxedo Man. Parks and Shirley Robison, who again had her arm around the younger woman, were ordered to the sidewalk across the street. After that, nearly every time she saw someone in a uniform pass close or rush by, Parks would call out and ask if her children would be okay. If they heard her and took the time to respond, the answer was usually on the order of, “I don’t know,” though sometimes, “Yes.” One officer, Pete Cacheiro, later testified that he told Parks in no uncertain terms, “Everything will be okay. Your kids are okay.”
He told her that multiple times. Not just that they would be okay. But that the children were okay, and that she shouldn’t worry.
Everyone, i
t seemed, wanted to calm her rather than crush a mother’s hopes, though they all knew, with each passing minute, that the likelihood of a tragic outcome was rapidly approaching certainty.
Shirley Robison would later say Parks wept silently most of this time. She kept an arm around Parks constantly, frequently hugging and consoling her. She and her husband hardly knew her, but they perceived what seemed to them a grieving, worried parent, and they wanted to comfort and help.
Others who saw Parks in passing or from a greater distance that night, however, would recall thinking she looked strangely unemotional, perhaps dazed or in shock or, less charitably, as if she were putting on a pretense of grief. Tuxedo Man was among these latter, recalling he felt far more hysterical than the mother at the curb appeared to be. “It didn’t seem right,” he’d say, though he also admitted never getting closer to her than fifty feet. None of these accusatory observations surfaced at first—not until the police had gone public with allegations that they believed the fire had been intentional. Yet the authorities gave more credence to these views than to Shirley Robison, who had been with Parks that whole dreadful night.
Several of the newly arrived officers tried to bull their way through the front of the house to reach the children, just as Robison had tried earlier. They did this by entering the door to the master bedroom, which was the closest to the street, due to the fact that it had been added on to the front of the former garage during the apartment conversion decades before. This unusual floor plan led to confusion later, as many assumed this frontmost door opened into the living room.
One officer who entered the house in that first rescue attempt would later describe how he felt driven forward by the sound of the children’s screams. But within moments of entering the apartment the officers found themselves on their knees, blinded and overcome by heat and smoke. They crawled back toward the open door, barely reaching the outside. They could no longer hear the screams.
Meanwhile, Reserve Officer Timothy McGee, whose volunteer work put him on patrol once a week and paid him a symbolic one dollar a year, took in the sight of what he described as an apartment completely engulfed in flames, with smoke streaming out of virtually every crack and joint, flames burning through walls and windows and roof. He paused a moment to think how best to reach those trapped children. Why run through a burning house to get to the kids, he thought, when there might be a way to run around the building to reach the outer walls of their rooms? There would be windows in back, he reasoned, maybe even a back door.
McGee dashed down the narrow space between the Parks apartment and the next house to the south. But before he got halfway to the rear of the house, dense smoke and heat pouring off the apartment enveloped him, leaving him unable to see or breathe. He had to turn around, barely making it back up the driveway on his hands and knees, patches of his uniform smoldering as he choked and gagged upon finally reaching fresher air.
Around the same time Officer McGee sought to quell his coughs and catch his breath before making a second attempt to crawl to the back, another Bell patrol officer would later report having the same idea of trying to enter through the rear. But Officer Jeff Bruce recalls running along the north side of the apartment, where there was more open space along the property line, offering a buffer from the intense heat and smoke streaming from the building. He made it on the first try, finding a tiny backyard illuminated by the wavering light of flames and some spillover light from a back porch fixture next door. Squinting through the smoky haze, Bruce saw that the apartment’s rear wall lacked a back door but had three windows large enough to climb through. He recalls that all were intact. He peered into one with no screen on it. Inside, Bruce could see nothing but thick black smoke and, perhaps, the flicker of flames, though he was not positive about that. Much later this would become a crucial and disputed detail, as would everything Bruce had to say, although he would be one of the few first responders to write a detailed report about the fire within a day, rather than relying on years-old memories alone.
Bruce tried to open the window. Hot to the touch, it wouldn’t budge. Was it locked? Painted shut? According to Ron and Jo Ann Parks, they recalled the room with stuck windows belonged to Ronnie Jr. Bruce, however, would later report that he was peering into the room shared by one-year-old Jessica Parks and her sister, RoAnn, one month shy of her third birthday.
To avoid wasting precious seconds trying to wrestle the window open, Bruce raised his heavy-duty department-issue flashlight and swung it like a hammer hard into the large windowpane. He expected the brittle music of breaking glass and the feel of his flashlight punching through into the room. Instead, he felt his blow rebound with a dull thud. Some kind of plastic! His blow had caused no damage. He cursed the cheap windows and pounded furiously until the plastic finally cracked and gave way. He knocked away some of the soot-coated shards with his flashlight handle, then started to hoist himself into the room. Inside, billowing smoke obscured everything. For a heartbeat, he saw no children. No furniture. Just blackness. And then, after the briefest of pauses, light—the light of a rapidly expanding fire blooming inside.
Air rushed in from outside and, very quickly, the room exploded in flame. Before he could drop into the room, which likely would have left him badly burned or killed him outright, Bruce realized breaking the window had made matters worse. Much worse. The room had plenty of fuel to burn, but until he broke the window, too little ventilation had kept the fire starved even as the room filled with very hot air and smoke from other areas of the apartment.
As Bruce half leapt, half fell back from the windowsill, a gout of smoke and fire shot through the window. Both Bruce and a next-door neighbor, Lloyd Richard Powell, who had been watching the police officer’s rescue attempt from his own backyard, were overcome by the explosive plume of smoke and heat pouring through the window. The neighbor was already frail with heart disease—Powell was the friend who Tuxedo Man had been worried about. Now he retreated into his house to lie down and calm his coughing fit.
When he filed his police report the next day, Bruce seemed to overstate his heroics, claiming he entered and searched the bedroom for kids to scoop up and rescue, only to be driven back outside empty-handed by flames that nearly consumed him. This version of events, which Bruce later recanted, would have a major impact on the investigation and trial to come. It would be used to cast doubt on everything he had to say, including his recollection of little or no visible flames inside the girls’ bedroom before he broke the window. The fact that a neighbor corroborated most of Bruce’s story would be ignored. None of his observations would be used by police fire investigators in constructing their official story of how the fire progressed from room to room—a theory that assumed the girls’ bedroom had been aflame long before the 911 call was placed. Prosecutors would insist for decades that Bruce was discredited completely as a witness and should not be believed.
After breaking the window, Bruce made his way back to the front of the apartment for fresh air and to see if the other officers had better luck in their rescue efforts. With the burning house serving as the primary illumination and no one yet in command, none of the first responders who flocked to the fire scene knew what anyone out of their line of sight was doing. Individual officers tried whatever came to mind, knowing that the fire trucks were mere minutes away but that the children inside the apartment might not have those minutes to spare.
Reserve Officer McGee had recovered sufficiently by then to make another race along the south side of the house to the backyard. This time he made it, unaware of Bruce’s aborted attempt just as Bruce had been unaware of McGee’s. Once at the rear of the apartment, McGee began struggling to pry loose a stubborn window screen on one of the other windows, cutting and burning his hands, but never managing to gain access. McGee recalled two years after the fire—the first time investigators asked him to describe what he saw and did that night—that all the windows in back of the house were still in
tact, contrary to Bruce’s report and the neighbor’s account. Because very few witnesses and first responders wrote reports or were interviewed about the fire until years had passed, there are many inconsistencies and differing versions of what happened that night.
As McGee struggled unsuccessfully with a window screen, the fire trucks arrived in front. A young firefighter, one who had never experienced a fatal fire before and who was determined to keep it that way, charged into the house first. Even from the street, Dirk Wegner had seen that the apartment appeared to be what he called “ripping”—a fully involved structure, with deadly temperatures as high as 1,200 degrees ripping through the place. At that stage, flashover could suddenly envelop firefighters in flames so intense that they could be burned to death even inside their fire-resistant garb, face masks, and breathing apparatus.
Foremost in Wegner’s mind, however, was what he heard while pounding up the driveway: a mother pleading for help for her trapped children. He concluded their only hope lay in his racing directly to the back rooms as quickly as possible, no matter the danger. Taking the “nozzleman” position—the firefighter who directs the hose spray—he used his high-pressure line to blitz the flames as he advanced into the living room, cutting a path toward the rear. Several times the fire almost closed back around him as he dashed through. Years later, testifying without benefit of notes or other memory refreshers, Wegner recalled this harrowing journey took several minutes or possibly as little as forty-five seconds, his passage eerily lit by walls of flame yet obscured by toxic smoke.
With the advantage of hindsight, fire experts would later describe Wegner’s action as a brave but high-risk tactic. An alternative approach would have been to do what Bruce and McGee had tried: run to the backyard. Then fire hoses could have been sprayed directly through the windows and safely into the rear rooms from the outside—as would eventually be done by other firefighters. The problem with first launching a driving frontal attack was that, while knocking down the flames in the front of the house, the high-pressure hose stream could push hot gases, smoke, and flames toward the rear of a building, literally chasing hot gases and burning material into the very part of a building rescuers hoped to reach and evacuate. It’s an unavoidable effect of firefighting and, given the chaos and intensity of the fire, most firefighters would likely do the same as Wegner and attack the flames head-on.
