Arson Fire Kills 4 in Long Beach; Arrest Anticipated Today

A fire that was deliberately set raced through the halls and staircases of a Long Beach apartment house late Wednesday, killing a mother and two of her children and a man who was trying to help his family escape.

Police made no arrests Thursday, but homicide Sgt. Jim Ryals of the Long Beach Police Department said there was a “strong possibility” at least one murder suspect would be arrested today.

The midnight fire was set in the hallways and at the stairwells on both stories of the long, narrow 50-year-old apartment house at 1334 Peterson Ave., fire and police investigators said. There was no doubt it was arson, Ryals said.

On the second floor, Domitila Castellanos, 28, and two of her three children, 3-year-old Erika Estevez and 8-year-old Esmeralda Estevez, died of burns as they attempted to flee down a stairwell, investigators said.

The third Estevez child, 6-year-old Saul, escaped the building and raced to the nearby apartment where Florina Cervantes lived.

Boy Burned

“The little boy came to my front door and was crying, ‘Where’s mommy, where’s mommy,” said Cervantes, a close friend of Castellanos and her children. “The boy was half blind from burns. Half his skin had turned color and was peeling. I didn’t recognize him at first, and I kept trying to remember what his face looked like.”

The boy was reported in critical condition at County-USC Medical Center late Thursday with second- and third-degree burns over 57% of his body, a hospital spokesman said.

Also killed in the fire was Raul Navarro, 25, who had fled into the hallway when he and his family had trouble removing the iron window bars that had been installed to protect them from burglars, relatives said.

The bars eventually snapped open as they were designed to do, and Navarro’s wife and three children escaped through a window. However, Navarro’s badly burned body was found in front of their first-floor apartment, the relatives said.

“Raul thought it would be easier (for his family) to get out if he could go around and lift the bars from the outside,” said Refugio Navarro, the dead man’s uncle. “But it was already all in flames, and they caught him right in front of the door.”

Fifty-two other residents leaped to safety from unbarred windows and received only minor injuries, fire investigators said. Twenty-nine were first taken to an emergency shelter and then provided with temporary housing in motels, according to the Red Cross.

Damage, was estimated at about $200,000. Injuries might have been much worse had the building not been just a block from a fire station, Fire Department spokesman Russell Atwood said.

The 11:20 p.m. blaze was controlled within a few minutes and extinguished by about midnight, he said.