Officers Spot Apartment House Blaze, Help Evacuate 31 Safely

A suspected arson fire that started in a construction site near MacArthur Park early Friday spread to an adjacent fourplex, leaving 31 people homeless, authorities said. No one was seriously injured.

Residents were quickly evacuated after two Rampart Division police officers, Tom Walker and Ken Sanchez, spotted the flames and sounded the alarm at 1:22 a.m. with the siren of their patrol car and with a loudspeaker warning in English and Spanish.

The officers joined RTD police officers, who were cruising in the area, and hurried through the building, knocking on doors and waking residents.

“Some of them didn’t want to go,” Sanchez said. “They wanted to grab some possessions, but we told them they had to get out.”

Hours later, outside the burned structure at 808 S. Grand View St., residents stood in the bright sunshine and waited--for something.

“It’s often like that,” said a worker around noontime at an empty Red Cross evacuation center set up at Belmont High School near downtown Los Angeles. “They stay at the scene, apparently hoping that what happened to them will go away.”

But reality was all too apparent to Margarita Hurate and her two sons, ages 1 1/2 and 5; to William and Sylvia Cabreria and their two sons, Henry, 5, and Danny, 3; to a dozen members of the George and Coila Garcia family, and to the other victims.

Some of the 31 people who lived in the old two-story building lost everything and had nothing but the clothes they wore. Others managed to save some things, which were piled in the front yard and at the curb. Children took turns holding a scorched and broken statue of the baby Jesus claimed after the fire was extinguished at 2:02 a.m.

“We were sleeping,” said Marcos Garcia, 17, a sturdy youth wearing a leather jacket. “We heard screaming, ‘Fire! Fire!’ and my mom and dad took the kids out. All my family is all right.”

“Somebody was slapping me,” said William Cabreria, a Department of Water and Power landscaper. “I looked out and saw the flames, and I went looking for the fire extinguisher, but by then, it was getting too late.

No Trousers

“I woke up my wife and started out, but then I saw I didn’t have any pants, so I grabbed a pair and got out.”

Eleven fire companies--about 55 men--responded to the alarm. Damage was estimated at $50,000 to the fourplex and $80,000 to the partially framed apartment house next door at 822 S. Grand View.

Assistant Fire Chief James Young said virtually no work had been done on the apartment project for the past 18 months, and the nearby fire company had asked the owner to hire a security guard for the site.

“We always try to get them to do that, but it doesn’t always work,” Young said.

Fire officials said they found 10 to 15 transients who apparently had been living in a completed underground garage at the construction site, including a woman who suffered minor scratches and burns. One resident said she had complained to police that drugs were being sold at the site.

The cause of the fire was under investigation.

By mid-afternoon Friday, the Red Cross said that about half of those who escaped the blaze had showed up at the Belmont High evacuation center.