Fatal Fire Blamed on Obsession

A Glendale man arrested on suspicion of setting an early morning fire in which his wife and six children died confessed that he wanted to kill even the children because “they were a product of the wife,” police said Wednesday.

The mass slaying was the climax of Jorjik Avanesian’s obsessive questioning of his wife’s fidelity that dated back to when the family lived in Iran, where he had served a prison term for trying to stab her to death, according to police, acquaintances and Avanesian’s sister.

Avanesian’s action was “premeditated for some time,” said Lt. Raymond Edey of the Glendale Police Department.

“He was very calm, very cool, very collected” while describing to police how he spread gasoline as his family slept early Tuesday and then turned the one-bedroom apartment into a smoke-filled inferno, Edey said.

“He verbalized very meticulously what he had done,” Edey said. “He had full knowledge of what he was doing and what the end results were going to be.”

Avanesian described setting the fire in Wednesday’s editions of Asre Emrooz, a Persian-language newspaper in Encino, where he went after the fire and was arrested.

In that account, Avanesian denied that he meant to harm his three sons and three daughters, ages 4 to 17.

He told the newspaper that he intended to die in the flames himself, changed his mind and fled the apartment without realizing that his family was dying.

“I intended to put my house on fire including myself,” the paper quoted Avanesian as saying, according to a translation commissioned by The Times.

“Unfortunately, the large tin can of gas hit the wall and when I struck the matches, I myself caught fire.

“At this time, one of my daughters awoke and perceived that my hands had caught fire. The look of the child dissuaded me from repeating the setting of fire to the house, and I then rushed to the street.”

In the article, he said he went to the newspaper after the fire so he could talk about the event in his native language, which is called Farsi by some speakers and Persian by others.

Of Armenian descent, Avanesian lived most of his life in Iran and emigrated with his family to Turkey, where they lived for more than a year before coming to Glendale in October.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office filed seven counts of murder and one count of arson Wednesday against Avanesian, 40, alleging special circumstances that make him liable for the death penalty.

Killed in the fire were his children Roland, 4, Romic, 6, Rodric, 8, Ranika, 10, Rita, 16 and Roobina, 17.

Avanesian, who is being held without bail in the jail ward at County-USC Medical Center, is scheduled to be arraigned this morning.

Ghader Jason Mirsaeid, a Farsi-speaking investigator for the Nick Harris private detective agency in Van Nuys, said that Avanesian tried to hire him to trail his wife, Turan, who went by the name Susana in Glendale.

When the two met in a Glendale restaurant 11 days before the fire, Avanesian said he wanted evidence to help him divorce his wife and to have her deported so he could keep the children, Mirsaeid said.

He alleged that his wife was unfaithful, took a drug that increased her sexual desires and may have encouraged one of his teen-age daughters to have sex with a man, Mirsaeid said.

Mirsaeid said Avanesian was upset because his sister and his brother-in-law were on his wife’s side, believing that she was doing nothing wrong.

Avanesian also said he had served a prison term in Iran for stabbing his wife, Mirsaeid said, an account repeated by Avanesian and his sister to Glendale police.

Mirsaeid said he turned down the job because he regarded Avanesian as paranoid and dangerous.

“He was so calm and normal when talking about how he had stabbed her before,” the detective recalled.

When he heard the news of the fire on the radio early Tuesday afternoon, Mirsaeid said, he drove immediately to the home, where he had gone with Avanesian after they met.

Standing by the fire-scarred building, Mirsaeid said, “I was very shocked. I wanted to cry. I remembered standing outside talking to him and seeing the daughter walking to school. It was very tragic. I left very quickly.”

Police said Avanesian’s sister, Maro Ovanesyan, who lives five blocks from her brother’s apartment, told them that he had been imprisoned in Iran for attempting to kill his wife.

Ovanesyan remained secluded with relatives and friends Wednesday, but a cousin described her as angry at her brother and devastated by the loss of her sister-in-law, nieces and nephews.

“Everyone’s crying--they’re very, very sad,” said the cousin, Nagapet Avanesian. “Everyone’s angry at George. It was seven people that are gone. It’s like Hitler.”

He said funeral arrangements had not yet been made.

An interpreter who interviewed Avanesian for Glendale police said the murder suspect had come to the United States as a refugee.

However, a spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service said Wednesday that agents were unable to locate records of Avanesian’s entry into the country.

On Nov. 4, soon after his arrival in the United States, Avanesian came to the attention of Los Angeles County authorities when his wife filed a domestic complaint accusing him of throwing a chair at one of the children and later drawing a knife.

The district attorney’s office ordered Avanesian, his wife and one of his daughters to attend an office hearing in January, said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the office.

She said the hearing officer, Dale Bootow, described the couple’s behavior as cordial, saying they held hands during the interview.

Bootow referred the couple to counseling at the Armenian Relief Society and Social Service Center in Pasadena, Gibbons said, but did not have the power to compel them to go there.

The office hearing program deals with criminal situations in which there is insufficient evidence to file a charge, or where the case is not worth the court time it would take to prosecute, Gibbons said.

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Times staff writer Doug Smith and correspondent Steve Ryfle contributed to this story.