Man Arrested in Glendale Fire That Killed 7 in Family

GLENDALE —  In one of the grisliest arson slaying cases in Los Angeles County history, police arrested a 40-year-old Iranian immigrant Tuesday on suspicion of killing seven members of his family by setting fire to their apartment.

Glendale police said Jorjik Avanesian surrendered at the office of a Persian-language newspaper in Encino, where he had gone to tell his version of the story in his native language to the publisher.

Avanesian called the newspaper from a pay phone around 10 a.m. and asked to be picked up and taken to the office, saying, “I want to tell you the horror story before I tell the police,” said Homayoun Houshiar Nejad, publisher of the daily Asre Emrooz.

Avanesian then confessed that he set the fire out of jealousy, because “his wife was involved with drugs and had been with another man,” said Nejad, who tape-recorded the interview for use in a story to be published today.

Nejad said Avanesian told him he intended only to injure his wife, Suzana, and did not know until he learned from a radio newscast while he was being interviewed that his wife and six children, 4 to 17, had perished in the blaze.

“He was very upset,” Nejad said, because his daughters had pleaded with him not to start the fire.

“They said, ‘Daddy, no, don’t,’ ” Nejad quoted Avanesian as saying.

Police said Avanesian also made incriminating statements to officers after his arrest, but they did not confirm details.

The death toll of seven in Tuesday’s fire was apparently the second highest for an arson fire in the county’s history. In the worst case, 25 residents of the Dorothy Mae Apartment-Hotel in downtown Los Angeles died in a 1982 fire set by a 21-year-old over a family dispute with an uncle who managed the building. Humberto de la Torre is serving a 625-year sentence for that fire.

In Tuesday’s incident, about 120 residents of the Harvard Terrace apartments in the 1300 block of east Harvard Street found their way to safety as flames burst from the Avanesians’ first-floor apartment at 5:49 a.m. and lapped from their balcony to the two units above it. Residents said the initial blast of fire made them think an earthquake had hit until fire alarms began ringing and they smelled smoke in the hallways.

Cesar Gonzaga, 70, said his wife opened the door to their apartment--located immediately across the hall from the Avanesians’--and a cloud of thick black smoke rushed in. Fighting panic, he rushed to get his family, including his visiting daughter and 4-month-old granddaughter, to safety over the balcony.

“I was so scared. I was just trying to carry the baby down the ladder, and my pants were falling off. Then somebody took the baby from me, just before I fell off the ladder,” Gonzaga said.

Ernest Badounts, 16, a classmate of one of the Avanesian children at Glendale High School, said he helped two elderly people out and then jumped out of a first-floor window when he became trapped.

“There was panic,” Badounts said. “They were crying.”

Eventually, everyone escaped except the Avanesians, whose shrieks neighbors said they heard for about a minute.

“You could hear the screams,” said Carlos Flores, who was awakened by the blast in his next-door apartment which backs up to the Avanesians’ balcony. “It’s something I’m going to carry all my life.”

Fire officials said they could not explain why the Avanesians became trapped in their one-bedroom apartment, where most of the fire’s $150,000 in damage was concentrated.

Glendale Fire Battalion Chief David Starr said the bodies of an adult and two children were found in the bathtub, with the body of another adult nearby on the bathroom floor. The bodies of two small children and a teenager were found in the bedroom.

The youngest child found in the bedroom was transported to a hospital, but fire officials later said they thought the boy was already dead at the scene.

Fire officials were unable to conclusively identify the dead Tuesday morning because of fire injuries. But police said they were presumed to be Avanesian’s wife and the six children, based on reports by neighbors and the building management.

Residents of the building, predominantly immigrants from Armenia, said they did not know their Iranian Armenian neighbors well.

As residents milled around outside the burned building, Glendale City Councilman Larry Zarian, himself an Armenian of Iranian descent, walked through the apartment shortly after the fire.

“I saw what appeared to be the bodies of two kids in the bedroom, laying on top of each other, and their clothes and hair were still intact,” Zarian said. “And I am told the other bodies were in the bathroom, where they tried to save themselves.

“It was quite emotional to go in there and see these people,” Zarian said.

Investigators concluded that the fire was caused by arson after detecting a chemical smell like that of gasoline.

However, investigators said they did not know exactly how the fire was started. Although the coroner had not determined the causes of death, Perkins said it appeared all seven victims died of smoke inhalation.

Almost immediately, Glendale police pinpointed Avanesian as the prime suspect.

Avanesian, who was unemployed after arriving in the United States last October, had been arrested in November on suspicion of using excessive force in disciplining a child, police said. He served no jail time but received counseling under the direction of the district attorney’s office in Glendale.

Sgt. Rick Young of the Glendale Police Department said Avanesian was arrested Nov. 4 after his wife complained that he threw a chair at one of their children and brandished a knife. The district attorney’s office declined to file charges against Avanesian in that case.

Lead detective Jon Perkins said that on Tuesday morning neighbors saw Avanesian running from the three-story building with burns on his hands. He went to his sister’s home a few blocks away, arousing the suspicions of someone there who phoned police, Perkins said.

Perkins handed out Avanesian’s photo about 10:30 a.m. asking for media help in apprehending Avanesian, who was considered likely to flee the country.

By then, however, Avanesian had already gone to a phone booth at Brand Boulevard and Milford Street in Glendale, called the Persian newspaper and was talking to Nejad.

Nejad said he received the call at about 10 a.m. from Avanesian, who wanted to tell his story to the newspaper in his native tongue because his English is not very good.

Nejad said many families with problems rely on his paper because it is a place where someone understands both their culture and language.

Avanesian made no mention of deaths in the fire, Nejad said. “He told me: ‘I think maybe my daughter was burned on the leg, but that’s it.’ ”

The publisher of the 7-year-old newspaper said he was unsure what to do after hearing the story.

“I didn’t know if he killed somebody or not,” Nejad said. “So I just listened to him.”

About 30 minutes after the taped interview, a newspaper employee heard over the radio that the family was dead.

“I was very scared then,” Nejad said. “So I called police.” West Valley police arrived minutes later and arrested Avanesian.

Avanesian was being held in Glendale jail pending charges of arson and seven counts of murder.

Administrators at John Marshall Elementary School a few blocks from the apartment identified three of the family members as students there--brothers Romic Avanesian, 6, and Rodric Avanesian, 8, and their sister Ranika, 10.

“They were darling children,” said Nancy Jude, the principal. Jude said all were working hard to learn English and impeccably observed the school’s voluntary uniform policy.

Ranika, a fourth-grader, had approached school officials only Monday to ask if her first-grade brother, Romic, could take extra classes during the school’s four-week midwinter recess.

Ranika was “the mother hen,” Jude said. “She was learning quickly; she was very bright. She was very concerned for her brother. She would check in every few days with the first-grade teacher to see how Romic was doing. . . . She was a very kind girl. Sweet and lots of fun.”

Romic “made friends easily,” Jude said. “He was very kind, very sweet.”

“They were very well-adjusted,” she said of the three. “They seemed to be great students.”

The two oldest girls, Rita, 16, and Roobina, 17, were in the 10th and 12th grades at Glendale High School, where Medea Kalognomos, their guidance counselor, described them as good students, “always smiling, very polite, very cordial.”

“They were pretty, decent and nice girls” who were assimilating quickly in the United States, she said.

“By the second week of school, they already looked like American schoolgirls,” the counselor said. “They were wearing Nikes, jeans and not too much makeup.”

Steve Kissablak, 15, a 10th-grader at the school who lives in the apartment building, said: “The girls always said hello to us, they were really friendly.”

Robert Manasyan, 16, another neighbor said, “They were just--how you say it?--just schoolgirls. They were just nice girls. You didn’t ever hear them talking loud. They were nice people.” About their father, he said, “You wouldn’t think he was a bad guy or a killer. The father was nice, too.”

Social workers at Glendale’s Armenian Relief Society said they could understand how the pressures of assimilation could push a new immigrant to the breaking point.

Parik Nazarian, a social worker for the society who immigrated to Glendale from Iran 15 years ago, said she sees people like Avanesian come into her organization for counseling almost every day. Although the younger Iranian Armenians are more optimistic about life in America, frustration mounts for the elders.

“The older Armenians have little luck finding jobs because of the language barrier,” Nazarian said. “I see how it affects them, especially if they have a family to support. They feel worthless, as if their situation is hopeless. It’s very possible Avanesian felt this way.”

The Armenian Relief Society, which has been serving the Los Angeles Armenian population for 14 years, provides translation services, job placement and counseling for the county’s 500,000 Armenians.

Nazarian says problems among Iranian Armenians have become more apparent in the past two years. The divorce rate is rising, as is homelessness.

“There is also no tradition with Iranian Armenians for therapy, so the feeling of isolation is even more stressful,” said Michelle Stein-Evers of Ketab, the Iranian information center.

Times staff writers Efrain Hernandez Jr., Margaret Ramirez, Beth Shuster and Frank Williams and correspondents Nicholas Riccardi and Steve Ryfle contributed to this story.