Town Rejects Rothenberg Parole Plan

Residents of a Riverside County desert hamlet have angrily rejected the idea that Charles Rothenberg, who set fire to his son in Buena Park, be paroled to a nearby ghost town.

The unusual vote in Desert Center was reminiscent of the battle over the 1987 parole of another notorious state inmate, Lawrence Singleton, convicted of raping a teen-age girl and hacking off her forearms with an ax.

Rothenberg, who 6 1/2 years ago doused his son with kerosene in a Buena Park motel, is tentatively scheduled to be released from the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo on Jan. 9.

Corrections officials met with 182 residents in Desert Center on Tuesday night to discuss the idea of paroling Rothenberg to a state facility about 25 miles from their community, which is near Interstate 10 about halfway between Blythe and Indio.

Known as the Eagle Mountain Return to Custody Center, the minimum-security compound houses about 200 men who have violated their parole but are not great enough risks to the community to be returned to prison. It is located 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.

Voting Tuesday night, the residents rejected Rothenberg’s parole to their community by a margin of 150 to 32.

State prison officials said the opposition did not surprise them but they hoped to avoid the kind of controversy that enveloped Singleton’s parole.

“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.”

Singleton was virtually driven from several Northern California cities by outraged citizens who learned he was about to move in. He finally had to be housed in a trailer on the San Quentin prison grounds.

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 the 1983 fire.

In his latest letter to The Times, Rothenberg said he will always live with the pain of knowing he nearly killed his only son and that he wants to help other parents who commit “child abuse.” But he has said previously that he will not try to contact either David or Hafdahl, who is 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.”

The 90-minute meeting Tuesday night in a community hall was emotional.

In front of several television cameras, one man said Desert Center residents did not want a man living in their town who “doesn’t deserve to be alive.”

Another man, citing separate proposals to use the region for the disposal of trash from Los Angeles, accused officials of first dumping solid waste in their community and now, with Rothenberg’s parole, “human waste.”

Parole officials must now “return to the drawing board” in their search for a place to parole Rothenberg, a former New York waiter who claimed he tried to kill his son to hurt the wife who divorced him. Whatever the outcome, Kindel said, he will not be paroled to Orange County and there will be “intense scrutiny and supervision” to “protect his son and to protect him.”

Rothenberg’s release date from the California Men’s Colony originally was Dec. 11 but was delayed after he was found to have smuggled a letter out of the prison instead of mailing it as the rules require. If a pending investigation finds that Rothenberg smuggled another letter out, he may remain imprisoned an additional 15 to 30 days, Kindel said.