Arson Suspect Denies Crime, Cites Illness

The man accused of setting two fires at an apartment complex under construction in Northridge said Sunday that he is innocent of the charges and incapable of scaling a fence on the grounds of the complex that arson investigators say he climbed.

Robert Bruce Williams, 32, said in an interview at Los Angeles County Jail that he has cancer and has been under chemotherapy treatment since an operation a few weeks ago to remove two of three large tumors on his stomach.

“All my neighbors know it wasn’t me. They know I haven’t got anything to do with that construction site and they know I’m too weak to climb any fences,” Williams said. “The doctors tell me I’ve got another tumor in me the size of a football.”

When Williams was arrested Friday, city Fire Department Chief Donald Manning said the suspect “somehow got past a fence and security guards” last Wednesday to douse the second and third floors of the three-story complex with a flammable liquid and start the blaze. It destroyed what was left of the 114-unit building after an arson fire a week earlier. Three firefighters were injured battling the second fire, one seriously.

Williams, who is 6 feet, 2 inches tall and weighs 280 pounds, looked pale and weak behind the glass of the visitor’s booth as he described how he was awakened by the sound of the first fire and went out to take pictures at the complex, one block from his home.

“What’s so ironic is that the first few shots on the roll all have other people standing there with the fire in the background. There was no way I was the first person there, and I certainly wasn’t the one who set it,” he said.

Although he tried to sell some of his fire photographs to news agencies, he said, other photographers got their work in earlier than he could.

When the second fire was started, Williams said, he was awakened by sirens and barking dogs. He said he ran into a neighbor as he went down the street to watch the fire.

“I said, ‘Can you believe it’s happening again?’ and we went to have a look,” Williams said. The next time he heard anything about the fires was when officials raided his home Friday afternoon and arrested him, he said.

Since his arrest, Williams said, he has not been receiving the pain medication doctors prescribed for him. He also said he has not yet talked to a lawyer, “because they say it’s my responsibility to call one myself but they don’t have any phone numbers.”

Williams was cut off in mid-sentence Sunday when the jail’s phone communication system between visitors and prisoners was shut off at the end of the visitation period.

He had one more thing he desperately wanted to say.

“Please tell them that I didn’t do it and I hope that they catch the right person soon,” he printed neatly on a piece of scrap paper before deputies returned him to his cell.