Fire Lover (2002)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Karen Krause stayed as the rest of the family arrived, and they remained for several hours. Waiting.

  The fire chief of South Pasadena was at a fire-prevention class in Los Angeles when he learned of the disaster at Ole's. Chief Gene Murry excused himself, jumped in his staff car, and sped to South Pasadena, arriving close to 8:30 p. M.

  He saw that one of the crews was attempting to breach an exterior wall in order to penetrate it with heavy "master stream poles," an appliance that could deliver more than five hundred gallons of water per minute. While Chief Murry was assuming command, he learned of the fire in progress at Von's Market on the same street, just a few minutes away. He couldn't believe it.

  Chief Murry spotted John Orr snapping photos, and asked if he would assist by going to Von's to conduct an investigation. It wouldn't be until midnight that the fire chief could declare that 125 firefighters had the Ole's blaze under control.

  Moments before the smoke was observed in the housewares department, Patricia Parham, the mother of Carolyn Krause, had gone to Ole's Home Center to see her only daughter. Patricia Parham was with Carolyn's two children: her son, age three, and her two-year-old daughter. Mrs. Parham picked up her daughter's house keys so that she could take the grandchildren home and put them to bed.

  Back at Carolyn's house, Mrs. Parham received three phone calls in quick succession, one from Carolyn's father-in-law, one from Carolyn's sister-in-law, and one from Carolyn's brother. When Mrs. Parham raced back to Ole's parking lot, the building was engulfed, and she never saw her daughter again.

  Sometime after 8:00 p. M. the phone rang in the Cetina residence. Luis, Jimmy's older brother, picked it up and a family friend said, "How's your brother? Is he home?"

  She seemed upset, so Luis said, "Why?"

  And she said, "Because there's a fire where he works."

  Luis's mother asked him in Spanish what was wrong, but Luis answered, nothing. Then he ran out to his car and drove to Ole's.

  Fair Oaks was cordoned off by police cars, so he had to detour and take Orange Grove Avenue, finally parking in a handicapped zone near Ole's. He jumped from the car, leaving the lights on and his keys inside, and just started to run, until a cop stopped him and said, "You can't leave your car there."

  Luis turned to him and cried, "My brother works there!"

  The cop hesitated, but let him go.

  When Luis reached the flaming building he spotted an employee whose name he couldn't remember, and he yelled, "Where's my brother?"

  The young man said, "I don't know!" Then he added, "I think he might still be in the building!"

  Luis Cetina then ran to the north side of the building and entered an open area, splashing through four inches of water where the sprinklers had activated.

  Another Ole's employee whom he recognized was standing there watching, and Luis shouted, "Where's my brother?"

  The young man said to him, "I saw him a little while ago! He went back inside!"

  "Back inside?" Luis cried.

  "Yeah, there were people banging on the door! One of those fire doors that dropped down!"

  Then Luis Cetina, not knowing where to run, circled around to the back, to the door through which Jim Obdam had escaped. The door was open now, but impassable. Luis returned back the other way to the fire door that had previously served as the main entrance to a Thrifty Drug Store that formerly occupied a space in the strip mall.

  Luis stayed right there, where there also used to be a Laundromat at which the children would wait while their mother washed the family's clothes. Their dad would sometimes buy them an ice cream there at Thrifty's, when he could afford it.

  It was two o'clock in the morning before he went home to face his mother with the truth.

  Matthew Troidl was at home with his wife, Kim, and their five-year-old daughter, Bethany. Matthew William, his two-and-a-half-year-old son, was with his grandparents, and while Matthew Troidl's wife was speaking on the phone, there was an emergency breakthrough on the line. It came from one of her brothers, who said that Billy Deal had called about a fire at Ole's, and that Billy couldn't find Ada and Matthew William.

  While en route to Ole's, Matthew Troidl and his wife kept reassuring each other that it was probably a small fire, maybe a trash can or Dumpster, and that it had just caused some confusion. That's all it was. Confusion.

  But when they arrived, they saw the ventilated roof shooting flames one hundred feet in the air. And there were police cars, and fire engines, and ambulances, and chaos. But they managed to find Billy Deal in all that pandemonium and he told them the worst.

  Matthew Troidl said later that he had all kinds of crazy thoughts. Maybe they'd gotten out a back door! Maybe they'd been hurt and were already at a hospital! Maybe they'd crawled up in the air-conditioning vent and were okay! Maybe. So many of them just kept thinking, maybe.

  The man designated to lead a six-man investigative team the next morning was Sergeant Jack Palmer, a twenty-five-year law-enforcement veteran assigned to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department arson-and-explosives detail. He had investigated nearly five thousand fires in his twelve years as an arson cop, and had the resources of the county of Los Angeles on which to draw. The tiny South Pasadena Fire Department needed vast assistance for this major disaster, and the LASD in their green jumpsuits-the Lean Green Machine-were there in force.

  Sergeant Palmer immediately did his walk-around of the ravaged structure, looking for the fire's point of origin. The west portion of Ole's was destroyed, and the east side showed heat and water damage from the sprinklers that had gone off.

  Skip loaders and bulldozers were already moving debris while the investigators, armed with shovels and wheelbarrows, tried to find the bodies of the four missing victims. Each time a skip loader would snare a load, investigators had to look inside for remnants of charred human beings.

  Sergeant Palmer saw the crane remove twisted steel beams from the center of the building where the roof had collapsed, and talked with an employee who had been called to the scene. Palmer was told that plastic products had been on display, but he was not told that there were racks full of polyurethane foam products, which, he would later say, "go like wildfire."

  After his hour-and-a-half investigation, the arson cop decided that he was unable to eliminate as a fire cause the possibility of electrical shorting in the attic area. He later said that this fire was very hard to read because there was so much potential fuel in the store, and that overhead burning, which caused ceiling material to drop and start secondary fires, could have ignited numerous hot spots.

  Jim Obdam was interviewed by Sergeant Palmer, and he did tell the investigator that he'd observed a column of dark smoke nearly two feet in diameter in the southeast part of the store, by the housewares section. But Palmer never interviewed Anthony Colantuano, the employee who had seen not only smoke in that area, but fire burning in the racks, an amazingly fast fire that chased him and created a draft of its own, blowing him out the door.

  And employee James Cuellar later said that he had been only thirty feet from the southwest fire door when the starting point of the fire was still the entire length of the store away. Yet he had barely escaped without injury. The fire was on him just that fast. He was not interviewed.

  But Sergeant Palmer did learn that there were two other retail-store fires in the area on that terrible evening, and that they had both been deemed arson fires, but Palmer decided that since they were set in potato chip racks and not polyfoam, they were probably unconnected to the Ole's blaze.

  Soon, in the northern portion of the ruined building, far from where Jim Obdam and Anthony Colantuano had seen the first column of smoke, searchers found human remains.

  Another fire investigator, who arrived on the scene at 7:00 a. M., was a supervisor with the arson-bomb unit of the California State Fire Marshal's Office, where he'd worked for sixteen years.

  Jim Allen, like any arson investigator, was looking for signs of the fire's direction. No
rmally, fire moves upward through a heat-transfer process, and as it hits a surface-a wall, a ceiling-it follows the path of least resistance, spreading out in a V pattern, upward and outward. The V or convex pattern reveals the point of origin in a simple fire, but the Ole's disaster had not been simple.

  Allen noted that it was in the center of the building that the roof had collapsed. In addition, after temperatures in the location reached 160 degrees and melted the doors' fusible links, both north and south steel fire doors had rolled down as they were designed to do. The assumption was that a major fire would occur after hours when no one was in the store, but the speed and heat of this fire had been astonishing, and those doors had sealed egress quickly, very quickly.

  Allen stayed about seven hours, a lot longer than Sergeant Palmer, and after three or four of the aisles had been dug out, he prowled through the southeast corner with John Orr, a friend and colleague who had also arrived on the scene.

  Jim Allen was of the opinion that the investigation, like the fire, was moving too fast. This fire had caught up with people trying to outrun it, so there had to have been a large load of fuel. Of course, he knew that polyurethane foam is a hydrocarbon fuel that comes from a petroleum product, with the burn characteristic of petroleum, but he did not learn of its presence, not that day.

  Allen didn't like the speed with which Sergeant Palmer's conclusions were being offered, and he said so to John Orr, but his colleague failed to tell Allen that there had been two other retail-store fires in the area the night before. And he never mentioned that he had been at the scene of one of them to consult, and was the official investigator on the other. Three such fires might indicate an arson series, and play a significant role in determining the nature of the Ole's fire.

  During the early afternoon, Jim Allen, John Orr, and other arson investigators were ordered out of the area by a tall sheriff's department lieutenant who said, "We're going into body recovery now."

  When Allen protested, the tall lieutenant said, "You can leave, or run the risk of being arrested for interfering."

  In addition to never learning about the polyfoam in the southeast quadrant of the building, Allen was curtailed by the LASD investigators, who said that all witnesses would be interviewed by them.

  At a meeting that then took place there in Ole's shopping center, at a Winchell's doughnut shop, Sergeant Palmer said to the huddle of fire investigators, "I can't eliminate an electrical problem in the concealed space between the false ceiling and the roof."

  "We haven't come up with a point of origin," Jim Allen offered. "Let's keep going."

  "We should be unified with our conclusion," Sergeant Palmer said, but Allen replied, "I'm writing up my report that it's an undetermined fire. I don't know for sure if it started in the attic or where it started."

  Ultimately, Palmer believed it had been a "drop-down" attic fire probably caused by faulty electrical wiring. There was no spirited debate. The dozen or so arson investigators who had shoveled through the debris, and watched the recovery of four bodies, ate their Winchell's doughnuts, drank their coffee, and by their silence acquiesced to Sergeant Jack Palmer's conclusion.

  In order to understand the compliance of so many trained arson specialists at the fire scene one must understand the hierarchy and class structure that divides the profession. First, there are arson investigators who have been drawn from the firefighting ranks. Although they have peace-officer status, carry firearms, and effect the arrests of fire-setting criminals, they are and always will be, to the other class, just gun-toting firemen who, if they depart from arson investigation, will go back to the flrehouse to scrub fire hose and polish chrome. The other arson investigators, those who come from the ranks of the police service, are first and foremost cops. They are law-enforcement officers assigned to arson investigation and will be law-enforcement officers after leaving the arson ranks. Their K-9 symbol is the German shepherd police dog, the true descendant of the wolf, not some white-and-black bag of spots that chases a fire truck.

  Also, Sergeant Jack Palmer was not a cop from a town like South Pasadena or any of the other little cities that make up the foothills area and the San Gabriel Valley. He was with an agency that numbered in the thousands, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which, along with the Los Angeles Police Department, was one of the major police entities in California. The Lean Green Machine sometimes was called by critics the Mean Green Machine.

  Fire investigator Jim Allen, who had, early in his adult life, been a San Joaquin deputy sheriff, knew who wins in a pissing contest between cops and firemen. So, when Sergeant Palmer essentially called it an accidental fire, there was not much argument. In fact, people never did speak publicly of their differing opinions, not for a long time. They all knew who the Big Dog was.

  John Orr was especially angered by Sergeant Palmer's meeting and placed a call late that morning to Dennis Foote, a fellow arson investigator for the city of Los Angeles Fire Department. He asked Foote if he or some other member of the mutual aid force, the Foothill Arson Task Force Group, could respond to assist with the Ole's inquiry.

  John Orr also wanted to see a file that Foote had been compiling, a file dealing with a fire series that had been occurring in Los Angeles and the vicinity for about four years. Some of those fires involved the ignition of potato chips, others involved combustible materials such as polyfoam. What they had in common was their occurrence in retail establishments during business hours, usually in the afternoon or early evening.

  On one of those investigations Dennis Foote had collected a delay device that was different from most cigarette-matchbook devices. This one, or what was left of it, was a Marlboro cigarette with three paper matches attached to it by a rubber band. Such a device provided up to fifteen minutes or more for an arsonist to leave a store before the burning cigarette ignited the matches, which in turn ignited flammable material around them.

  When Foote arrived at Ole's, Orr told him that there had been other fires in the area the night before, and that possibly a delay device had been used to start them. Dennis Foote put on his helmet and his rubber boots and entered Ole's with Orr, but that area of the building was just about totally destroyed and the sheriff's investigators were already finishing up. Before he left, Foote gave his file-he called it "The Potato Chip File"-to John Orr.

  Then, a few days later, a peculiar thing happened: a fire erupted in Builder's Emporium in North Hollywood. It was in the polyfoam section, like so many of the others. Foote wanted another look at Ole's, another chance to determine if the Ole's fire could have been ignited in polyfoam products that burn violently. But it was too late. A wrecking company had cleared almost all debris from the building space.

  Matthew Troidl had tried to call his parents, who lived in the Bay Area, but when his father answered, the son couldn't speak. Troidl's wife, Kim, had to take the phone and tell the older man that his grandson was dead. And Matthew Troidl couldn't personally make the funeral arrangements for his son. He just sat in the house and rocked back and forth.

  They decided to bury the two of them in the same casket, Ada Deal cradling her grandson in her arms.

  The Pasadena Star-News reported that more than twelve hundred people packed the church for the funeral of Jimmy Cetina. The monsignor had decided to have the mass during school hours and the classrooms emptied. The police had to block traffic for miles down San Gabriel Boulevard for the two hundred cars that drove to the cemetery.

  Jimmy Cetina had applied for the job at Ole's to help out the family with the purchase of a used white Volkswagen. They couldn't afford insurance yet, so nobody had driven the car. It was parked in the backyard, and Jimmy had liked to sit in it and tell his family what he was going to do to fix it up. But Jimmy never got to drive it. His brother drove it behind Jimmy's hearse in the funeral cortege. Later they sold it. His father couldn't bear to have that white car around anymore.

  ***

  If dalmatians deferred to police dogs that day at the
scene of the Ole's calamity, there were other canine cousins on the prowl, sniffing and panting and baying at the possibilities. And these could outsmell any tracking dog, or bomb dog, or dope dog, or cadaver dog that ever lived. These could simply point a nose at a headline, then raise up and smell it in the air: grief, misery, death! They were contingency-driven trial lawyers.

  When all was said and done, everybody would be sued: Ole's, its parent company, electrical contractors, subcontractors, anybody who might be willing to fork over some big bucks either through their insurance carriers or from their own pockets, or from Grandma's sugar bowl. When the Ole's Home Center investigation had officially concluded, with the finding of probable electrical malfunction in the attic space, the trial lawyers and the defendants settled out of court for four million dollars, costs that usually get passed on to consumers.

  A few days after her sister-in-law's funeral, John Orr spoke to Karen Krause at the Glendale PD, and said how disappointed he was that the fire had been called accidental. He told her of other such fires in home-improvement companies, specifically mentioning Builder's Emporium in North Hollywood, where a fire had been started in a polypropylene mattress but, luckily, got extinguished by the sprinkler system, and had left behind remnants of a delay device.

  "There should've been investigators present at the autopsies of the victims," he told her. "Polypropylene may have left particles in the victim's lungs or in their tracheas. Or there may have been gases present that were absorbed by the bodies, and it might've come out in a proper autopsy."

  If there had been investigators there knowing what to look for. But there were not, and now no one would ever know.

  Two months after the Ole's calamity in South Pasadena, another disaster nearly befell that unfortunate company. The Ole's Home Center on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena barely escaped a similar fate. A partially burned incendiary device was found by an employee.

  Arson investigators called it a "signature device": the cigarette, the three paper matches, and a rubber band. It was found in a partially burned stack of polyfoam that had been scorched but hadn't fully ignited. This signature device was known only to local arson investigators, who hadn't publicized it-therefore, it couldn't be a copycat. Some wondered if the fire setter had graduated from potato chips to bigger targets.