D.A. Probing Death in Bank Tower Fire

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has opened an investigation into the First Interstate Bank fire to determine if involuntary manslaughter charges are warranted in connection with the death of one worker in the blaze that gutted four floors of the downtown office tower.

The prosecutor’s office entered the case last week when it received a report on possible wrongdoing from the Los Angeles Fire Department’s legal division.

The focus of the district attorney’s investigators will be the events leading up to the death of Alexander John Handy, 24, a maintenance worker at the building.

Handy died moments after being ordered to take an elevator to the 12th floor of the building to check out a persistent fire alarm. His elevator car became stuck on that floor, where the fire broke out, and he perished in the 2,000-degree heat.

It is not clear who is the target of the district attorney’s investigation or precisely what is being examined.

Jan Chatten-Brown, special assistant to the district attorney who is heading the investigation, said the inquiry is still in the early stages and investigators only received the coroner’s report on Thursday.

The probe is being handled by the special Occupational Safety and Health Unit that routinely investigates workplace deaths. The unit did not immediately become involved in this case because it was not initially considered a work-related death, officials said.

But information that has since been uncovered persuaded prosecutors to open their own inquiry, said Chatten-Brown.

The district attorney’s office, she said, is working closely with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which has also launched an inquiry into the one death and 40 injuries suffered by workers at the tower. That investigation has not yet been completed.

Besides these investigations, the Fire Department is scheduled to complete its massive “critique” on the fire--a document that fire officials said Thursday is about eight inches thick--within the next week.

In a preliminary report made public soon after the blaze, Fire Department officials said that security workers at the tower had repeatedly turned off fire alarms originating on the 12th floor. The guards, fire officials said, apparently believed that the alarms were more of the many false alarms that had plagued the building in the weeks before the blaze.

Fire Chief Donald O. Manning has previously said that at least seven minutes elapsed between when the first alarm was sounded and when a report of the fire was called in to the 911 emergency number by employees of neighboring buildings.

Officials at Pedus Security, which was in charge of security at the building, have disputed those findings. They have maintained that Pedus employees called in a report of the fire within one minute of the first alarm.

On Thursday, attorney Rob Kelly, who represents Pedus, said the company has not been contacted by the district attorney’s office but had been warned by investigators in the Fire Department’s legal office that their report would likely be filed with prosecutors.

Chatten-Brown said the district attorney would only file charges if investigators found “gross negligence” that would support a case of felony involuntary manslaughter.

Possible charges for violations of the fire code, or misdemeanor criminal charges, would be referred to the Los Angeles city attorney, Chatten-Brown said.

The special occupational safety unit--with three full-time attorneys and eight investigators that are shared with the environmental protection unit--has handled 21 cases since its founding in 1985. Chatten-Brown said the unit has filed charges in other fire cases.

It has also referred other cases to local city attorneys, including 12 in which charges were eventually filed.

Meanwhile, the wife and daughter of Handy filed a lawsuit in Superior Court on June 30 alleging that the tower’s owners and various other parties acted negligently and contributed to his death. They are seeking damages to be determined at the time of trial, funeral expenses of $8,817 and other compensation.