Suspect Says He’s Too Ill to Have Climbed Fence, Set Fire

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 would have been incapable of scaling a fence at the complex to start the blaze.

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 growing 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 Chief Donald Manning said the suspect “somehow got past a fence and security guards” 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 two-thirds of it was gutted in an arson Jan. 8. Three firefighters were injured fighting the second fire, one seriously.

Pictures of Fires

Williams, who is 6 feet, 2 inches tall and weighs 280 pounds, looked pale and weak behind the glass of the jail visitor’s booth as he told how he went out to take pictures of the pre-dawn fires at the complex, which is one block from his home.

“During that first fire, I got up out of bed because I heard what I thought was the patter of raindrops on the roof,” he said.

“I went outside to cover up the washer and dryer and a few other things that need protecting out in the yard, and I realized there was this big orange globe in the sky, lighting up everything,” he said.

Grabbing a camera from his bedroom, Williams said, he joined at least half a dozen neighbors watching the fire.

“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,” he said. “There was no way I was the first person there, and I certainly wasn’t the one who set it.”

Williams said he worked for six years as a photographer at Universal Studios and held several other jobs in photography before becoming unemployed early last year when the company he was working for went bankrupt. Hoping to make a few dollars on his fire photographs, Williams said he took the negatives to several news agencies the following morning.

‘Thought I Had a Scoop’

“I was so excited because I thought I had a scoop,” he said, because he saw no news photographers on the scene when he began taking pictures.

Although he said the news agencies expressed interest in his photographs, they did not buy them because other photographers had given them their shots of the fire.

When the second arson struck, Williams said he was awakened by sirens and barking dogs. He said he met a neighbor as he was going 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. “There were already all kinds of people there with cameras, so I just took a few shots and went home because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sell any.”

He later took prints of his photographs from the first fire and the roll of film from the second arson to Fieni’s Photo Inc. in Northridge. He said an employee there told him that the store does photographic work for arson investigators and that authorities might be interested in examining his prints.

The next time he heard anything about the fires was when officials raided his home Friday afternoon and arrested him, he said.

“The only connection I can figure between me and those fires are the photographs,” he said. “Somebody said a friend turned me in, but that’s impossible because I didn’t do it and all my friends and neighbors know that.”

Authorities said they confiscated several rifles and handguns at Williams’ home Friday, in addition to some cocaine and marijuana. Officials said he is being held on suspicion of two counts of arson, and possession of weapons and narcotics.

Williams said the firearms are part of a collection that he has been gathering since 1970.

“Everything I had in the way of firearms was perfectly legal and registered to me,” he said. “They were all bought purely for collection value. Most them are spotless and have never even been fired. . . . As for the drugs, as far as I know, (the police) put them there themselves.”

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

“I’m supposed to get my medicine every four hours, but they’ve only been giving me other stuff that doesn’t work as well,” he said. “I’d say I’ve been to see the nurse maybe three times in the 48 hours I’ve been here. . . . They’re saying they’ll let me go to my chemotherapy treatment on Tuesday. I sure hope they follow through with that. I need it to survive.”

Doctors have told him he has six months to live if he does not receive the radiation treatment, he said.

When he was allowed to make his first telephone call Sunday morning, Williams said he called his two housemates “to see what was left.”

“They tell me people are breaking into the garage and trying to take things and that people are breaking in through the windows that the police came in through,” he said.

“And they said the police took just about all my camera gear . . . and photographs from off the walls,” including one of a burning truck that he took when he spotted an accident on a freeway.

Williams said he graduated from Chatsworth High School in 1969 and has lived in the Valley for more than 20 years. He has rented the Northridge home in which he lives for the past five years and has attended classes at California State University, Northridge, where he is a senior majoring in photography. Williams said he was taking the term off from school because of his cancer treatment.

His only prior arrest, he said, was in the early 1970s, when he was arrested on charges of possessing marijuana. Those charges were dropped before his arraignment, he said.

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

But 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.