by Edward Humes
It was around this time that Reserve Officer McGee, still struggling with a window in back, heard Bruce shouting from the front, “Where’s McGee?” Then, louder and closer, he heard Bruce calling directly to him, “McGee, get out of there, it’s gonna blow!”
Reluctant to give up on his rescue attempts, McGee didn’t really believe there was imminent, explosive danger. He knew nothing of fire dynamics and firefighting techniques; he didn’t know yet that the firefighters had arrived and that they were converging on the rear bedrooms from inside. But he heard what sounded like fear or panic in Bruce’s voice. So he grudgingly heeded the warning, taking cover by jumping over the same cinder-block wall on the property line that Tuxedo Man had scaled ten minutes before. A moment later the apartment’s remaining rear windows blew out in a rush of scorching flames and smoke.
Inside the apartment, Wegner finished his dash to the back and found himself in a small bedroom in the southeast corner. He could see nothing in the burning, smoke-filled space, so after he knocked down the flames in the bedroom he recalled that he directed his hose spray through the blown-out windows, chasing the smoke and steam outside. The atmosphere cleared enough for the firefighter to see where he was: the girls’ bedroom. He saw walls, floor, and ceiling blistered by fire, smoldering debris on the floor nearly tripping him as he turned on the spot to survey the scene.
The room had been devastated, the walls blackened and charred in places all the way through. He saw a badly burned bed under one window, and beneath a second window, he saw what looked like a crib or playpen that had been consumed entirely but for its sooty metal frame. Both beds were covered with charred bedclothes, along with other burning debris and blackened ceiling tiles that had fallen from above.
On each bed there appeared to be a severely burned doll, also partially covered with debris. Except Wegner knew those blackened figures were not dolls at all. RoAnn, the older girl, lay facedown, sprawled diagonally across the foot of the bed, one leg dangling over the edge as if she fell or dove there. Jessie lay faceup amid rubble that had fallen from the burning ceiling. Wegner’s stomach roiled. There would be no rescuing anyone from this hellish room. By the extent of the damage to the walls, to the furniture, and to those little girls, it seemed they had died before he even entered the building. His effort had neither helped nor hurt. It simply came too late.
Wegner wanted to search the other back bedroom next, but there was no direct access from the girls’ room. He would have to circle back through the kitchen and into the living room where the door to Ronnie’s room opened. But before he could make that move his air-supply alarm went off, signaling only five minutes of breathing left. Standing orders required Wegner to leave immediately for a fresh tank. Other firefighters would search for the boy as they extinguished the fire, Wegner knew. So he worked his way back outside to switch tanks and to report his grim discovery.
4
Statements
A voice in the darkness finally tore Jo Ann Parks’s gaze from the burning apartment and its surrounding chaos. A uniformed police officer had materialized at her side, leaving her struggling to make sense of his words: “I’ve been ordered to drive you to the department to take your statement.”
After a few moments, she nodded woodenly, murmuring assent. Parks had been standing where she had been told to stand, at the curb across the street. Word had not yet spread about the discovery of her daughters’ bodies. Not even Frank Espejo, the Bell police officer now standing before her, had been told.
“What about my children?” she asked once again as he ushered her to his police cruiser. “Are they going to be okay?”
Espejo told the truth: He did not know. He had taken the original 911 call at the police station, then had broadcast the “all units” emergency over the radio, called the fire department, and raced over to the apartment to see if he could help. Now he would complete the circle by questioning Parks about what happened. He would get her statement on the record, and then wait with her in the quiet of the station for word about her children.
Shirley Robison, who had stayed by Parks’s side since the first bang and scream at the front door, rode in the back of the police car with the younger woman, clinging to her new neighbor’s side out of an instinctual kindness she never really fathomed. She even accompanied her into the station house, where she bore witness to everything that followed. Parks continued seeking assurances about her children’s fate and asked one of the officers if her husband, Ron, could be called to the station from the graveyard shift at the Darigold ice cream packing plant in Los Angeles. Then she gave the police her first—and most concise—account of what happened.
Any first statement to the police—whether it is by a witness, a suspect, a victim, or a police officer—automatically becomes part of the gospel of an investigation. For better or worse, no matter the circumstances or stress under which a first statement is made, it will become the standard against which all future recollections will be compared. Any deviation in the future can be ignored or written off as normal vagary of memory. Or divergences from the gospel can be used to savage even the most saintly person’s credibility. Changing the story can be viewed as an act of increased honesty, bravery, virtue, or understanding, or as a lie that proves dishonesty, lack of credibility, and guilt. Jo Ann Parks had just entered perilous, life-changing territory, where each word, each nuance, each fact uttered, withheld, or forgotten could determine her fate. If she had done something wrong, she already would know she was in danger before saying a word. If she was innocent of any wrongdoing, she had walked into a trap unwarned and unaware of the stakes.
According to Espejo’s report on this conversation, Parks said she put her three children to bed quite early in the evening. Espejo wrote down six P.M. as their bedtime—an hour and a half before dark that time of year in LA. As soon as Parks was sure the kids were sound asleep, Espejo reported, she went to her bedroom and shut the door, falling asleep early as well.
The next thing she knew, the sound of her children screaming jolted her awake. Parks told Espejo she opened her bedroom door to go to them, but a blast of heat and smoke met her immediately, driving her back. Unable to move farther into the house toward her children, unable even to see anything through the smoke and flames, she had run in a panic outside to the patio and onward to the Robisons’ house to get help. Investigators would later deduce that she left both the interior and exterior doors from her bedroom open when she fled, providing fresh ventilation for the fire, which quickly advanced into the master bedroom. This provided one possible explanation for why Bob Robison encountered more severe heat, smoke, and flame conditions entering the house than Parks had faced leaving a minute or two earlier.
In that first statement to police Parks also volunteered that one of the Parkses’ previous homes had burned down a year earlier in the nearby suburb of Lynwood. The fire had been caused by an air conditioner with faulty wiring, she told Espejo. No one had been home at the time and so there were no injuries in that fire, but the family had lost most of their clothes and possessions. They had no insurance. They had moved to another place after that, but then Ron was laid off, forcing them to lodge at a homeless shelter. They had only just gotten back on their feet because the ice cream plant had rehired Ron, allowing them to move into the Sherman Way apartment a week earlier.
Parks said nothing about Ronnie playing with matches, and Espejo’s report provides no indication he even questioned her about any possible cause of the fire. Yet the same report quotes the Robisons’ recollection that Parks arrived on their doorstep voicing fears that her son might have started the fire.
This first statement was not tape-recorded, and Espejo’s questioning was nothing like an interrogation. His written report was a bare-bones distillation of their conversation, not a stenographic word-for-word account. There was a reason for this casual approach, which also helps explain why few of the other officers and firefighters
took notes or wrote reports about their observations and actions during the fire: No one imagined a crime had been committed. The fire was treated as a tragedy, an accident. They were there to rescue, not investigate, and they acted accordingly. Parks and her attorneys would later say she was in a state of shock at the time and could not clearly recall events. Yet this truncated version of events inevitably became her credibility baseline, against which all future statements by the only survivor of the Sherman Way fire would be compared.
All the officers and civilians who entered or stayed near the burning apartment came away smelling strongly of smoke, with some showing soot or burns on their clothing and skin. Five police officers, including Jeff Bruce, had to get hospital treatment for smoke inhalation. Several had to throw away their burned and stinking uniforms that were beyond cleaning or repair. But Parks showed no such signs of exposure to fire or smoke. Much later this, too, would be deemed highly suspicious. But at the time of the fire, no one expressed suspicion or doubt because, as Parks had told Espejo in that first account, she fled the flames almost immediately, without trying to fight her way through the burning house to the back bedrooms where the children slept. A mother had escaped a fire, tried to get help for her kids, but help arrived too late. Nothing about her behavior, appearance, or the fire scene itself led them to suspect otherwise at that time. Not even the voluntary revelation of a prior fire (which records quickly revealed had been ruled accidental) turned their compassion to suspicion. At first.
Back at the apartment, the firefighters had wrestled the inferno down to scattered smoldering hot spots by the time Parks completed her statement. But a mystery had emerged, along with a new hope: The oldest Parks child, Ronnie Jr., could not be found in the ruined apartment. Firefighter Wegner had swapped out his oxygen tank and gone back inside, moving room to room with particular attention to the two most common places children hide during fires: under beds and inside closets. Firefighters call this a “primary search,” performed more with quickness in mind than thoroughness. In Ronnie’s burned-out bedroom he found the boy’s futon sleeper had been reduced to a pile of ashes and melted plastic. It was obvious he had not hidden under there. Wegner then looked in the small closet. Whether the door stood open or closed when he got there would become a seminal point of contention in the fire investigation. In his first full account, at a preliminary hearing two years after the fire, he didn’t make clear whether it was open or closed when he got there. Later he would insist that it was closed. Either way, he saw nothing of interest inside the closet—only a large pile of burned debris and clothing, which seemed to have fallen down from hangers at some time during the fire or the firefighting.
Had one child somehow survived? Had the four-year-old escaped the flames and ended up wandering the streets? Was he hurt? Was he hiding? Did he flee because he knew he’d be in trouble for playing with matches? A search party quickly formed to walk the area, officers and neighbors moving up and down the streets, calling for Ronnie, looking for a small form walking or hiding in the shadows. Young Haney—Tuxedo Man—ranged many blocks looking for the boy, still desperate to answer those voices he heard crying out when he first arrived at the scene.
At this point word was sent to police headquarters about the possibility of Ronnie’s survival and the neighborhood search under way, as well as Wegner’s discovery of the girls’ bodies in their beds. No one told Parks any of this. Instead, the small contingent of officers manning the station in the early morning hours asked her if the Parks family had a minister they might call to provide support. She gave the number of the family’s Christian Science pastor, who was called in to comfort Parks and to break the news to her and, once he arrived, her husband.
The neighborhood search and its horde of eager volunteers found no trace of the boy after forty-five minutes of looking behind hedges, fences, and parked cars. When the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s on-call fire investigator, William Franklin, arrived around one thirty A.M., a more intensive examination of the still-smoldering apartment began. One of the firefighters assisting Franklin, Dirk Wegner, realizing his original search had been quick and cursory, zeroed in on Ronnie’s closet for a more careful examination. With the closet door open, he saw some partially burnt debris—clothes, papers, toys, a tangle of hangers—had tumbled out and lay at the closet threshold, a ragged mound topped by a snatch of bright red material, an unburned piece of a boy’s shirt. Protected by other objects during the blaze, this fragment of cloth provided an incongruously cheery splash of color atop the grays and blacks of ash and char.
This moment, investigators and experts later realized, needed to be perfectly documented on the night of the fire, from the second that this final search began to its conclusion. It was not perfectly documented, however.
Wegner and Franklin would later recall that the closet door had been shut when they entered the room, with debris piled in front of it that had to be moved before the door could be opened. Yet Wegner would also recall that he previously looked inside this closet during the hasty primary search for a child hiding or burned—which means Ronnie’s closet had to have been opened and the debris moved away from in front before this more thorough search took place. Both recollections cannot be true.
County fire investigator Franklin had brought his camera and intended to begin photographing the scene in Ronnie’s bedroom before the closet search began. His first picture shows the closet open, with debris in front of the threshold and severe burning on the inside surfaces of the closet, suggesting the door could have been open during the fire. Later Franklin would say no, he had inexplicably failed to take a picture of the closed door before the closet search began. No one at the time understood that evidence had been lost forever in this moment—evidence that could have helped determine whether this fire had been accidental or deliberate.
As the county fire expert looked on, snapping what would turn out to be a frustratingly grainy and incomplete series of photographs, Wegner reached into the debris pile inside the closet. After probing around a moment, his hand brushed an object that felt to him like a grapefruit. Then he realized he was touching Ronnie’s bowed head. The little boy had been there all along, hunkered down out of sight beneath the ashes and fallen clothes, crouched behind a metal milk crate from the dairy that his dad had brought home for storage.
Ronnie’s body showed severe burns and charring, though not as extreme as his sisters’, as he had been partially protected by the contents of the closet. Ronnie’s brown hair had not been burned away. The firefighter noted that the closet door had a knob on the inside, but that the outer knob was missing. Both sides of the door were badly and apparently equally charred. Whether the door was closed before firefighters arrived seemed of little importance at the time. Later that would change and become the subject of intense debate and accusations, complicated by the poor documentation, ambiguous photography, and contradictory recollections.
The coroner would later determine that the burns of all three children were potentially fatal, but that a primary cause of their deaths also was inhaling poisonous amounts of carbon monoxide. No closet door, open or shut, could have protected Ronnie from that invisible killer.
5
Victims
Back at the police station, a bleary Paul Garman arrived around two A.M. The Christian Scientist had been close to the Parks family for years, providing guidance about everything from California real estate to childcare tips to church strictures about healing with prayer rather than medicine. He had been close to Ronnie Jr. as well, counseling the four-year-old on his behavior from time to time, which included getting out of bed and wandering around the house at night to watch TV while everyone else slept, and at least one instance of his playing with matches. Now Garman went to Parks in the small break room at the Bell Police Department. He saw her sitting in a plastic chair, her short dark hair disheveled, her round face pale beneath the bluish lights buzzing overhead.
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nbsp; He hugged her, sat down with her, then took her hands. “Jo Ann, your babies are in heaven now,” he said.
Her eyes teared up. Yet her face remained a little blank. Initially, Garman told her what had been explained to him earlier: The girls were dead, but there was still hope that Ronnie had survived. Then word came in about the body found huddled in the closet just a few minutes later, and Garman had to crush that brief hope as well.
His own eyes wet, he had to repeat everything several times, expressing his sorrow, his condolences, his support. Each time she just shook her head. Garman began to worry that she wasn’t processing his words. It was so hard to tell with Jo Ann, he thought. In some ways she was childlike—the soft voice that sounded ten years younger than its owner, the round, unlined face framed by tousled dark hair. Yet Garman also found she had a somewhat flat emotional effect much of the time, making her hard to read. That’s just the way she was, something he attributed to the numerous childhood traumas she had confided in him over time. Her husband had the same emotionless demeanor, but more so. Still, Garman wished Ron Parks would get there already to add his support and comfort, thinking his friend should have arrived by then.
