Residents Reject Parole of Rothenberg

Residents of Desert Center in Riverside County have angrily rejected the parole of Charles Rothenberg to a nearby prison facility, indicating the kind of reception that may loom this winter for the father imprisoned for setting his son afire 6 1/2 years ago in Buena Park.

State prison officials searching for a spot to place Rothenberg when he is released early next year said they were not entirely surprised by the fierce opposition voiced at a heated meeting earlier this week in this town about halfway between Blythe and Indio. They said they will now look for another place to send Rothenberg.

Public opposition was so furious in several Northern California cities over the release in 1987 of Lawrence Singleton, convicted of raping a 15-year-old girl and hacking off her forearms with an ax, that he finally had to be housed in a trailer on the San Quentin Prison grounds.

“We hope that won’t be the case” with Rothenberg, state Department of Corrections spokesman Tip Kindel said Wednesday. “But given that experience, we certainly are preparing for that.”

Kindel said that wherever Rothenberg is placed, he will be under close supervision in a “structured program.” He will not, however, be placed in Orange County, where his son and ex-wife live.

Rothenberg’s son, David, and former wife, Marie Hafdahl, have said they want no contact with the man who disfigured the boy, then 6 years old, in a 1983 motel kerosene fire.

In a recent letter to The Times, Rothenberg said he will always live with the pain of knowing that he nearly killed his only son and that he wants to help other parents who commit “child abuse.” He has said previously that he will not try to contact either David or his ex-wife, who is now married to Buena Park Police Lt. Richard Hafdahl.

“We would like him as far away as possible,” Richard Hafdahl said Tuesday. “But we would actually prefer he be in California so we are in a better position to check on where he is at all times.”

Corrections officials met Tuesday night with 182 residents in Desert Center to discuss possibly paroling Rothenberg to a state facility about 25 miles from their community. Known as the Eagle Mountain Return to Custody Center, the minimum-security compound houses about 200 men. It is in a former mining town abandoned years ago by Kaiser Steel Co.

Riverside County officials granted the center a conditional-use permit last year on the agreement that the facility not house inmates convicted of arson, sex crimes or other violence. Part of the agreement calls for residents to approve any exception to those rules.

In a secret ballot Tuesday night, the residents rejected Rothenberg’s parole to the facility near their community by a vote of 150 to 32.

“As you can tell, the margin was not exactly close,” Kindel said.

Prison officials must now “return to the drawing boards” in their search for a place to parole Rothenberg, a former New York waiter who claimed that he tried to kill his son to hurt the wife who divorced him.

Rothenberg is tentatively scheduled to be released from the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo on Jan. 9.