‘All-American Kid’ Charged With Setting Forest Fire

’ . . . I was very surprised at what happened. You would never

have guessed it.’

--Pat Adams,Rancho Alamitos High School basketball coach

By most accounts, Robbie Lowenberg was the All-American kid: altar boy, high school football player, popular with the girls, the kind of teen-ager, said a neighbor, “that you’d want your daughter to date.”

The son of Cypress Police Chief Ronald E. Lowenberg, he was the oldest of six children in a family that seemed to epitomize the best of Middle-American values. On Sundays you could find them at St. Polycarp Catholic Church, seated as a family in some of the front pews for morning Mass. During the week, Robbie was the eager young sales clerk at a Garden Grove electronics store who outsold the older, more experienced salesmen through sheer hustle.

“You’d think it was the perfect family,” said the neighbor, Joyce Preuss. “All the kids are blond, really good-looking kids and very clean-cut. On Sundays you’d see the whole family troop out of the house all dressed up for church.”

But federal prosecutors say there was another side of Robert E. Lowenberg, a side that led him, for reasons that remain unexplained, to set a fire earlier this month that blackened more than 5,000 acres of woodlands in the Cleveland National Forest. The cost of fighting it has been estimated at $1.3 million.

At the time the fire was set, prosecutors say, Lowenberg was with an old high school buddy driving through the hills, relaxing and shooting a BB gun. The friend, 18-year-old Richard Tafoya, would later provide investigators with the information they needed to file arson charges against Lowenberg.

Lowenberg, 19, has admitted that he started the Silverado Canyon fire. He remains jailed at the Terminal Island federal prison in Los Angeles. Under orders from U.S. Magistrate Volney V. Brown Jr., he must enter a drug and alcohol treatment program.

Federal authorities prosecuting Lowenberg say the most baffling question in the case is the motive.

Former classmates say the tall, lanky teen-ager, who wears his hair in a crew cut, was neither a model student nor a picture of discipline. In fact, he dropped out of Rancho Alamitos High School in his senior year. But there was apparently nothing in his past to indicate that he was capable of a crime as serious as arson.

“We don’t have any idea why he did it,” said Tommy Lanier, a U.S. Forest Service special agent who investigated the case. “It may take a court-appointed psychiatrist to find out why.”

Lowenberg’s family has declined to discuss the case with the press, as have Tafoya and members of his family. In one of his few public statements on the case, Chief Lowenberg remarked after his son’s bail hearing in federal court that “we love our son, and we’ll certainly give him whatever support he needs. He’ll have to reconcile with himself and God.”

Until recently, the Lowenberg family lived in a quiet area of two-story and ranch-style homes near the corner of Magnolia Street and Katella Avenue in Garden Grove. It was there, amid manicured lawns and neatly trimmed cypress trees, that Robbie Lowenberg was raised and attended school before his family moved to Cypress earlier this summer.

Lowenberg attended elementary school at St. Polycarp, a strict, well-regarded parochial school on Chapman Avenue in Garden Grove, before going on to Rancho Alamitos High School, where he fell in with what several classmates called “the jock crowd.”

Lowenberg’s parents, Ronald and Kitty Lowenberg, are almost uniformly described as deeply religious and active in community affairs--he in his role as police chief and she through the neighborhood church where she participates in charity drives and Christmas bazaars.

Those who know the family best and came to their defense say the Lowenbergs went to great lengths to create the perfect family atmosphere in a strict disciplinary setting grounded in duty to the community and the church.

“They are a great family,” said Eleanor Parks, a Garden Grove school crossing guard who has known the family more than 30 years. “They are a family that is very involved and concerned . . . they tried to be perfect parents.”

But descriptions of Robbie Lowenberg by residents in his old Garden Grove neighborhood, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified, were not as generous.

One neighborhood teen-ager who went to high school with Lowenberg said he was “always a little wild. He went to a lot of parties where there was drinking and that kind of thing. When he was alone he was fine, but when he got around his buddies he was a show-off.”

At the high school, where Lowenberg is remembered as a capable if not outstanding defensive back on the football team, longtime basketball coach Pat Adams recalls him as “a very spirited guy with his share of disciplinary problems. But I was very surprised at what happened. You would never have guessed it.”

Comparing him to a test pilot, Adams said Lowenberg was always “trying the envelope . . . seeing what he could get away with, pushing the parameters. But I’ve been here 25 years, and I don’t guess that’s unusual for a young man his age. It really surprised me that he would do anything as anti-social as this. He didn’t strike me as a kid who was going to be a problem.”

After attending adult education classes to receive his high school diploma, Lowenberg landed a job at a nearby Radio Shack at the corner of Katella Avenue and Magnolia Street. He was good with people, and he excelled.

“I’d take him back tomorrow,” said Randy Detarr, the store manager. “Out of 200 salesmen in the district, he was always up there around 15th or 19th in sales. He was great with the customers. I only hire decent people, and I consider Robert a decent person.”

For the six months Lowenberg worked there, Detarr said, it was obvious that his closest friend was the thin young teen-ager named Richard Tafoya. Tafoya, Detarr said, would often come around the store and wait for Lowenberg to get off work.

“This was happening a lot,” Detarr said. “I mean almost every day, and it got to the point where I didn’t want Richard around. It just created too many distractions for Rob.”

Lowenberg and Tafoya had a lot in common. Both attended Rancho Alamitos and both had gone through the Explorer police cadet program at the Stanton Police Department early on in high school.

Like Chief Lowenberg, Tafoya’s father is also in law enforcement. He hears traffic cases as a juvenile court referee in Los Angeles.

Most of the details of what happened Sept. 9 in Silverado Canyon have yet to come out in court. But it is known that Lowenberg and Tafoya were together in a blue Toyota pickup truck that day, driving through the national forest and stopping occasionally to shoot aluminum cans with a BB gun.

In an affidavit filed in federal court, U.S. Forest Service investigator Nancy R. Ehmann said she was told that the fire was first reported about 2 p.m. by both Lowenberg and Tafoya. By that time, a Forest Service fire engine operator already had reported seeing a dark blue Toyota pickup parked near the fire and occupied by two men in their “early 20s, skinny profile, light hair.”

Less than 10 minutes later, Ehmann said, a second fire was spotted, this one about half a mile south of the first, near Maple Springs. When Ehmann arrived at the second blaze, she met Orange County fire investigator John McMasters as he was talking to the two young men.

According to Ehmann, Lowenberg and Tafoya immediately offered the information that they had reported the fire. They then claimed to have spotted another Toyota pickup, similar in color to the one they were driving, and said they had called 911 to report the suspicious truck.

But on Sept. 18, Tafoya changed his story and told Ehmann that it was Lowenberg who had started two fires “in Mr. Tafoya’s presence,” according to her affidavit.

Later that day, Ehmann said, she advised Lowenberg of his constitutional rights and he admitted “that he had started both fires in the presence of Mr. Tafoya.”

Garden Grove Fires Studied

Now, Garden Grove authorities are taking another look at 25 mysterious cypress tree fires reported in Lowenberg’s old neighborhood between August, 1986, and last May.

Federal authorities are expected to question Lowenberg about the Garden Grove fires, although they say they have no jurisdiction to prosecute anyone in connection with them.

Lowenberg’s attorney, Thomas Barham Jr., said it was “nonsense” to connect his client to the rash of unsolved blazes in Garden Grove and added that Lowenberg was in Oregon when some of those fires occurred.

The Forest Service’s Lanier said prosecutors plan to ask for a psychological examination of Lowenberg to determine whether he fits the profile of an arsonist.

Dr. Kaushal Sharma, a Newport Beach psychiatrist often used by Orange County prosecutors as an expert witness in criminal court cases, said arson is many times “a simple crying out for help or attention, an attempt to get back at people they love or trying to get away from some kind of pressure.”

“Every case is different, and it is wrong to focus on one thing,” Sharma said. “When a person does something totally unexpected, so anti-social, you try to determine why he chose this particular option that will cause such problems for himself, his family and society.”

Times staff writer Jane Applegate contributed to this article.