Death Amid Debris : Fire Victim Had Ignored the Complaints, Warnings

Frequent complaints from neighbors over the last several years and numerous warnings from government agencies to clean up his junk-filled property could not save Glen Larson.

On Tuesday, piles of papers, boxes and other discarded materials--reaching nearly to the ceilings throughout Larson’s Windsor Hills home--caught fire from sparks from a living room fireplace, gutting the two-story structure.

Los Angeles County firefighters said they had to dig through 50 tons of debris to find the body of the 87-year-old homeowner.

Larson told a neighbor that he had worked his way out West as a musician during the Big Band era and that he was among the first blacks to move into the unincorporated middle-class Southwest Los Angeles neighborhood in the 1950s. Larson, who also told neighbors that he had worked as a machinist and played with a philharmonic orchestra, raised two sons in the pink stucco home on Onacrest Drive.

Clean-Up Attempt

His grown sons returned on at least one occasion to help clear some of the junk their father had collected.

A neighbor said the young men worked hard through the day, loading several rented dumpsters. But Larson worked equally hard during the night, retrieving his possessions and placing them back in the house, she said.

“They finally threw their hands up,” she said. “It was a losing battle.”

Neighbors and county officials ran into similar resistance.

The elderly man--characterized as intelligent, resourceful and kind by the few neighbors who knew him--was regarded by others, however, as an eccentric pack rat.

Several neighbors complained to county authorities about the worsening eyesore and signed petitions to try to get the place cleaned up.

Daily Excursions

Although Larson’s yard was already piled high with materials of all sorts, neighbors said they watched for years as he would return from daily excursions carrying boxes filled with more junk, broken furniture, surplus exercise and auto equipment, tires, wood and scrap metal.

“I never saw him come home when he didn’t have something with him. Everything was going in that door, but I never saw him take anything out,” said neighbor Nancy Scrivens, 67.

Scrivens, a small woman, said that the last time she visited the Larson home a few years ago, she had to walk sideways to squeeze through the narrow aisles between piles of materials inside the house that resembled a storeroom.

Next-door-neighbor Edward Duncan, 69, who said he complained about the junk to several county agencies, blamed the fire on the government’s slow-moving bureaucracy.

“They’ve gone through the motions. . . . But the bureaucrats weren’t doing their job,” he said. “This fellow lost his life because the bureaucracy does not have the tools or the time to do the necessary follow-up.”

Thomas O. Bell, a county zoning enforcement officer familiar with the case, said that, after several fruitless attempts over the last four years to force Larson to clear his property, the case was sent to the district attorney’s office less than a month ago with a request that criminal charges be filed. A decision was pending when Larson died.

“We hadn’t walked away from this (case),” Bell said.

People commonly accuse the government of doing nothing, he added. “But we are constantly working toward an end.”

“We are not storm troopers,” Bell added. “We are not the Gestapo and we are not God. We have to work within the legal system.”