Duarte Man Arrested in Arson Death of Amputee

A man who police say lost $50 in a rock cocaine deal has been arrested for setting a blaze that killed a handicapped Monrovia woman in her bedroom Saturday.

Keith Allen Clark, 26, of Duarte is accused of torching the one-story house in revenge for a soured deal in which he allegedly gave money to one of the woman’s sons to make a drug purchase but never received the goods, officers said. Clark was arrested late Saturday and is being held in Monrovia jail without bail.

Police investigating the case said they believe the woman’s children had ready access to drugs and had facilitated such deals before.

“It was sort of like business as usual,” said Monrovia Police Detective Richard Wagnon.

Elizabeth Hicks, 73, whose legs had been amputated five years ago because of circulation problems, died of smoke inhalation in her bedroom shortly after the fire broke out at 3 a.m., police said. Her wheelchair was at her side.

Before succumbing, she awakened her 15-year-old grandson, who had fallen asleep watching television with her, and told him to flee. Carl Reynolds, a freshman at Monrovia High School, escaped in time to rouse his grandfather, Arthur Hicks, 75, who was sleeping in a camper parked in the driveway, relatives said.

They returned to the house, where the boy tried to douse the flames with a garden hose, but smoke drove him away. None of the three grown children who still lived with the family--Patricia, 38, Maurice, 36, and Ronald, 32--were at home.

On Monday, Maurice Hicks, an unemployed machinist, surveyed the gutted, smoke-blackened home on East Cherry Avenue that his parents bought in 1959. Damage to the home was estimated at $100,000.

“Let’s just say our life style doesn’t reflect the way we were brought up,” he said when asked about allegations of drug use at the house. “My parents raised us from the old school, where you’re brought up to know right from wrong, where you have work to do, and you don’t get a free ride.

“But I just kind of did a 180-degree turn,” he added. “I regressed instead of progressed.”

The Hickses were married in 1934 in Birmingham, Ala., said Arthur Hicks, a retired railroad inspector. His wife held a number of different jobs, the last as a maid at Hinshaw’s Department Store in Arcadia, before her operation.

Hicks said he regularly slept in his camper, a white-and-gray model plastered with stickers advertising different brands of chewing tobacco.

Police said they were called frequently to settle domestic disputes at the residence, which is in a neighborhood of small single-family homes that has long been plagued by drug activity.

Hicks would argue with his children, Wagnon said. “He always wanted to throw them out, but their mother didn’t want to.”

Friends and family described Elizabeth Hicks as a once-energetic woman whose medical problems had left her mostly bedridden.

“I just can’t believe anybody would do something like this, knowing what kind of condition Mrs. Hicks was in,” said a longtime family friend, Cleveland Charles, 43, who lives a block away. “It’s a horrible thing.”