Suit Blames Fatal Fire on Landlord

Twin sisters Karen Scruggs Myers and Sharon Scruggs returned from their catering job in San Diego to their rental home in Leucadia on Jan. 19 to find the house engulfed in flame and smoke, and went into hysterics.

The two 41-year-old women had to be restrained by firefighters because two of their children were still inside, entombed in the 60-year-old wooden structure at 837 Orpheus St. that, as firemen said later, went up like a tinderbox.

A third child had been rescued minutes earlier by two California Highway Patrol officers who just happened to be entering Interstate 5 at Leucadia Boulevard a block away and noticed the red glow in the midnight sky.

Today, an attorney for the two mothers plans to file a wrongful-death lawsuit in Vista Superior Court, seeking $3 million in compensation for a tragedy he says could have been avoided with the installation of a $6 smoke alarm.

The owner of the property, the lawsuit contends, had no intention of putting any money into the house because it was to be demolished to make way for a commercial development near the corner of Leucadia Boulevard and Orpheus Street.

The house was a structural mess, attorney Gerald Davee maintains on behalf of the two mothers. The electrical system was faulty, the suit contends, and the plumbing was so bad that hot water for the kitchen had to be drawn from a bathtub spigot. But the owners were doing nothing to maintain the house, the suit says.

An attorney for the property owners, a partnership of Taiwanese investors who live in San Diego County, said the owners are saddened by the deaths of the two children.

But, he says, they have not admitted culpability.

The house apparently was not insured.

“It’s not a pretty sight,” Los Angeles attorney Bruce Warren said of the situation and the apparent lack of insurance. “We have not found any valid, collectible liability insurance on that property.”

Warren represents the owners, whose partnership is called Leucadia 1.86.

The investors bought the property--and an adjoining house and lot--in early 1989 and planned to raze the structures for a commercial project.

But Encinitas Fire Protection District officials say the owners apparently decided to generate rental income on the two homes until time came to tear them down.

In November, the Scruggs sisters rented the downstairs, three-bedroom unit from the partnership, agreeing to pay $600 a month. A separate upstairs unit was rented for $400 a month to another tenant, Susan Fletcher.

It didn’t take long, said Davee, for the sisters to start complaining to Pacific Coast Realty, a Vista-based company owned by the same group of investors, about conditions in the rental house.

Davee says the house was “unsafe, dilapidated and unhabitable.”

There was faulty electrical wiring that caused circuit breakers to trip, for instance, causing “substantial periods of time” when there was no electrical service to the house, the lawsuit alleges.

Moreover, there was no hot water in the kitchen; the stove was faulty and the roof leaked--even to the point of water dripping on tenants in their beds.

There were no smoke detectors as was required of the house because it had recently changed ownership, Encinitas Fire Marshal Ron McCarver said.

The sisters complained regularly to Pacific Coast Realty about the problems, but, with one exception, nothing was done, Davee said.

On one occasion, he said, a handyman who was not necessarily a skilled electrician was sent to the house. He found the wiring to be in such bad shape that nothing short of removing it and rewiring the structure would take care of it, Davee said.

But that wasn’t done, he said.

The two women never complained to Encinitas City Hall about the deficiencies, Davee acknowledged. “They didn’t have the sophistication to complain to the city,” he said. “They tried to work directly through the owners’ representative.”

Even on the day of the fire, Jan. 19, another complaint call was put in to Pacific Coast Realty by the women. Somebody will come out, the sisters were told, according to Davee.

The two sisters, daughters of a career fireman in Chicago, left that afternoon for their catering job in San Diego. They had given instructions for Sharon Scruggs’ 15-year-old son, Ayikwei Scruggs, to watch over his 10-year-old sister, Ayida Ajanaku, and their 2-year-old cousin, Monife Myers.

All three children apparently went to bed thinking all was fine.

But, in the ceiling between the first and second floors, old wiring had arced inside its conduit and burned through the protective lining. Part of the ceiling heated from the exposed wiring, and began smoldering.

At this point, the three children might have been awakened by a smoke alarm, Davee said. The 15-year-old apparently slept in a back bedroom, and the two younger girls in a front bedroom.

Coincidentally, CHP officers Annette Hirschi, 32, and Tom Greenstone, 29, were parked at the Shell gas station immediately next door--their cruiser pointing directly at the house. They noticed nothing and drove off, intending to head north on I-5 to continue patrolling between Del Mar and Carlsbad.

As they turned onto the on-ramp, Greenstone looked over his left shoulder for traffic coming alongside of him--and saw a red glow and smoke from where they had left moments earlier. They backed off the on-ramp and rushed back to the gas station, thinking maybe a car was on fire. Instead, they saw the house ablaze.

The two took turns trying to get into the house. Greenstone said he heard two children in the front room crying, wheezing and coughing, but he was overcome by smoke and had to bail out. Partner Hirschi got inside, went to the bedroom and barely had time to grab a pair of feet--Ayida Ajanaku’s--and get her out of the house.

Neither one could get back inside. The teen-ager died in his back bedroom, and the 2-year-old died in the bed she shared with her cousin, who was saved.

The two CHP officers screamed in case anyone else was inside, and Susan Fletcher, 21, ran from her upstairs unit, escaping down an outside stairway.

Even though a neighborhood fire station was two houses away, by the time firefighters there got word of the fire through the CHP dispatcher, opened the doors of their firehouse and reached the fire, the damage was done.

McCarver, the fire marshal who also serves as the Encinitas city building enforcement officer, spent the next few days trying to determine the ownership of the property, which had changed hands recently. It took a title search to identify the owners and track their business address, in Vista.

The owners were in Taiwan at the time, McCarver said. By mail, he issued an infraction--a citation akin to a traffic ticket--fining the company $200 for each of two violations for failing to have installed smoke alarms, one upstairs and one downstairs.

The infraction was to have gone to court in San Marcos last week, but because of a clerical error the paper work had mistakenly been sent to the district attorney’s office, which does not prosecute infractions. A deputy district attorney sent the infraction back to McCarver, who will refile it.

Davee, meanwhile, prepared his expected lawsuit--a complaint for damages for “wrongful death, personal injury, destruction of personal property and negligent infliction of emotional distress.”

Susan Fletcher, the upstairs tenant, settled out of court with the owners for a sum in the “low five figures,” said Warren, the owners’ attorney.

Davee said the two sisters are still recovering from the trauma.

“They are so distraught, they’ve been unable to work,” he said. “They’re spiritual people, and they’re trying to explore why this happened and, now, how to deal with it. And they’re worried about the effect this is having on the surviving daughter.

“The girl is having a tremendously difficult time dealing with the fact that she survived but that her brother and cousin were killed.”

Said Warren of his clients: “They’re upset that young people lost their lives. But whether they’re saying, ‘Gee, it’s our fault they lost their lives,’ that’s not happening.”