State Will Keep Tightest Rein on Rothenberg

Charles Rothenberg, who set his son afire seven years ago, will have the tightest restrictions of any parolee in California after he is released Wednesday from prison, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections said Friday.

Tipton C. Kindel said the conditions of Rothenberg’s parole, finalized Friday, will include 24-hour supervision by at least one parole agent, who will live with him at an undisclosed location. An electronic transmitter the size of a cigarette pack will be attached to Rothenberg, alerting officials if he leaves his parole area.

The only way to remove the transmitter would be to break or cut it. If Rothenberg did this, it would amount to an automatic parole violation and he probably would be returned to prison.

A few of California’s 59,314 parolees also wear the transmitters, and a handful have lived under the supervision of a parole officer. But Kindel said not even Lawrence Singleton, paroled after serving his sentence for raping a teen-ager and axing off her forearms, had both security measures.

“This is the most restrictive parole ever in the state . . . and there are 59,314 parolees in California,” Kindel said. “Singelton had parole agents (with him) around the clock, but no electronic surveillance.”

“Good,” said David Rothenberg, 13, when told Friday night of his father’s parole restrictions. “I wish they would have kept him in (prison), though.”

Rothenberg, 49, doused his son with kerosene and then lit a match inside a Buena Park motel room shortly after midnight on March 3, 1983.

He had brought David from New York to Southern California but told the boy’s mother they were going to the Catskills. When she found out they were in California, she accused Rothenberg of kidnaping their son and told him he would never see David again once they returned home.

Rothenberg, in a twisted plot to hurt the wife who divorced him, ignited the fire and fled to San Francisco. He later confessed to trying to kill his son, explaining: “If I couldn’t have him, nobody could.”

He was convicted of arson, attempted murder and other charges related to the fire that nearly killed David and scarred him permanently. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison, the maximum sentence under determinant sentencing laws that were later toughened because of this and other cases in which victims of an attempted murder were permanently disfigured.

Inmates earn a day off their sentence for every day they work or attend school in prison. Rothenberg performed clerical duties and maintenance tasks and will have served 6 3/4 years when he is released from the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo.

His parole destination was finalized Friday but it will remain a closely held secret. Rothenberg won’t know where he is going until he gets there. He will not, however, be sent to Orange County, where David now lives with his mother and stepfather, Marie and Richard Hafdahl, the Buena Park police lieutenant who led the 1983 fire investigation.

Other conditions of Rothenberg’s parole are that he cannot contact the Hafdahls or visit Orange County. He will be required to make weekly visits for psychiatric counseling, Kindel said.

State law requires victims to be notified of their attackers’ release and parole site 30 days in advance. But the Hafdahls will not know exactly where Rothenberg is paroled because prison officials fear a repeat of the Singleton debacle.

In that case, the convicted rapist was virtually run out of several Northern California communities by residents outraged over his crimes and his prison release. Singleton finally had to serve his parole in a trailer at San Quentin.

Prison officials exhausted every legal effort to keep Rothenberg behind bars longer than his sentence and Kindel said corrections administrators believe his release is regrettable but unavoidable.

Consequently, Kindel said, the Corrections Department applied the toughest security measures allowable by law in Rothenberg’s parole.

Extreme restrictions have been placed on other high-profile parolees whose release might pose a threat to the public, an individual or to themselves, Kindel said. But the transmitters are less than 2 years old, he said. So such infamous convicts as Dan White, who killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, and Kenneth Parnell, convicted of the kidnap and molestation of the late Steven Stayner, never were subjected to them.

“They are pretty severe in this case,” Kindel said. “I think it’s pretty well recognized that Rothenberg is not a general threat. He’s pretty focused as to (who his victim was) and what he wants to do, reaching his son, I mean. But we feel the ramifications of what he could do if he were to try (to hurt him) again are pretty severe.”