3 Die in Fire; Window Bars Hampered Rescuers

Despite the frantic efforts of neighbors, relatives and firefighters to pry off iron window bars that trapped the victims inside, three people--one 18 months old--were killed Thursday morning when fire engulfed their home in Rosemead.

“We could hear their screams inside the house,” said Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Dennis Ortiz. “But before we could get through the bars, they had succumbed.”

Rosa Garcia, 51, and her 18-year-old daughter, Mercedes, were pronounced dead at the scene. Rosa Garcia’s infant granddaughter, Desiree, was rushed to the Garfield Medical Center in Monterey Park, but physicians were unable to revive her.

Four other residents of the two-bedroom home--Rosa Garcia’s son, Renaldo Garcia Jr., 27; his fiancee, Darla Cardiel, 17; his cousin, Alicia, 23, and her 3-year-old son, Adrian--escaped from the house.

Cardiel said she was in the home, watching television, shortly after 2 a.m. when Renaldo Garcia Jr. arrived and said that he smelled something burning.

‘Tried to Get In’

“He ran to one of the bedrooms and opened the door, and all this smoke came out,” she said. “All three of them--Rosa, Mercedes and my daughter--were stuck in there. He tried to get in, to get to them, but he couldn’t. The smoke was too thick.

“He ran outside and got an ax, and he and some of the neighbors tried to pull the bars off. He got some of them off, but there was too much fire, too much smoke. He couldn’t get to them.

“His sister kept screaming his name, ‘Ray!’ ‘Ray!’ And you could hear his mother crying. Then, after a while, you couldn’t hear them any more.”

When firefighters arrived at 2:47 a.m., Ortiz said, they found Renaldo Garcia Jr. and the neighbors still trying desperately to reach the three trapped inside the house at 3256 Isabel Ave.

“All the windows on the south and west were just boiling out fire and smoke,” Ortiz said. “It was a real hysterical scene.”

Using fire axes and other tools, firefighters wrenched off more of the bars, which had been attached to support studs in the walls and lacked any quick-release mechanism, according to Ortiz.

“Once they went inside, they groped in the dark until they found the victims,” Ortiz said. “They all apparently succumbed to the smoke.”

A neighbor, Jennie White, said that Rosa Garcia’s husband, Renaldo Garcia Sr., an iron worker, put the bars on the house shortly after moving there in 1979 to “beautify” the house.

White said she knew of no burglaries in the neighborhood in recent years and said neither the Garcias nor any other families in the area had expressed fear of break-ins. Few other houses in the neighborhood have security bars.

Rosemead relies on the county Building Code, which prohibits the installation of security bars on bedroom windows if the bars do not have a quick-release mechanism.

The cause of the fire, which apparently started in the living room of the small one-story stucco house, was under investigation.