$15-Million Suit Filed Over Arrest in Library Fire Case

The man who was arrested--but never prosecuted--in the setting of the disastrous 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Central Library has filed a lawsuit claiming that fire officials never had a legitimate reason to hold him for the crime.

The suit, filed last month in Los Angeles Superior Court, contends that part-time actor Harry Peak, 29, was beaten during his arrest last Feb. 27 and that he has been unable to get work because a Fire Department official falsely pronounced him guilty of setting the $22-million library blaze that broke out on April 29, 1986.

Peak was released three days after his arrest and no charges were ever filed. Two days after he was let go, Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Stephen Kay told reporters that fire officials had arrested Peak in the hope that he would confess.

“There was a lack of evidence to even get by a preliminary hearing,” Kay said at the time.

In the civil lawsuit, Peak’s attorney, Leonard J. Martinet of San Francisco, asks for $15 million in damages for false imprisonment, slander and negligent infliction of emotional distress and unspecified damages for assault, battery and invasion of privacy.

“It’s appalling that something like this could happen here in the United States, where a totally innocent individual could have his home entered this way and be beaten and imprisoned by government agents for the purposes of trying to extort a confession,” Martinet said Thursday in a telephone interview.

“It was a Gestapo technique,” the lawyer added. “I think they (arson investigators) didn’t have anybody to pin the fire on, and I think they received tremendous pressure from city officials to find a possible perpetrator.”

Defendants named in the lawsuit include Los Angeles city and county, which have both denied Peak’s administrative claims for damages; Los Angeles Fire Department Battalion Chief Dean Cathey, who told reporters that Peak was guilty of arson, and other unnamed Fire Department employees.

John Neville, who heads the Los Angeles city attorney’s liability division, said Thursday that the city has been served with the lawsuit but declined further comment. Attempts to reach Cathey for comment were unsuccessful.

Peak first came to the attention of arson investigators as the result of an anonymous tip, fire officials have said. Neighbors have said that the actor had told them that he had been at the library when the fire broke out but added that Peak had a reputation for exaggerating the truth.

“I figure that what really happened is that he heard about the fire or saw it from the freeway or something and decided it would make interesting conversation to say he was there,” one of Peak’s former employers said in an interview last year.

An attorney summoned by Peak to his jail cell after his arrest told reporters that Peak at one point told investigators that he set the fire. But Martinet, Peak’s civil attorney, said Thursday, “I don’t know that (Peak) ever did say that to anybody.”

Martinet, who has employed Peak as a part-time messenger in recent years, said he is sure Peak could not have committed the crime.

“I had spoken to him that morning, of the fire, and he had done some job for us,” Martinet said. When the fire broke, Peak was nowhere near the library, the lawyer said.