Owners of Home for Elderly, Poor Deny Neglecting Tenants : Fire: Couple say occupants of house were not mistreated. One person died in the blaze.

The owners of a house that was the site of a fatal fire said Friday that their elderly and poor tenants were not neglected--despite neighbor’s comments that some of the house’s occupants appeared skinny and infirm.

Leonard and Grace Fagan, both 77, lived next door to the fire-ravaged house, which they owned. The couple said the home was a kind of paying “guest house” for people they knew who needed a place to stay.

“All of ‘em had some sort of ailment and affliction,” Leonard Fagan said, referring to the four people he said gave him and his wife about $50 a month each for a room at 9621 S. Laurel St. in an unincorporated area near Watts. One tenant, Charles Smith, 67, died of fire-related injuries and four others were hospitalized after suffering moderate smoke inhalation, according to authorities.

Leonard Fagan described Smith, who was confined to a wheelchair, as a cousin and said another tenant was his brother’s former wife.

Authorities concluded that the fire was accidentally caused by a smoldering cigarette on a mattress. Grace Fagan said she doused the mattress when it first caught fire, but was not in the house when it erupted into flames a second time. She said she called the Fire Department when she saw smoke.

Neighbors said Thursday evening they found several dazed, elderly people in the debris-choked yard of the burning house, located in an industrial-residential area near the Jordan Downs Housing project. “They were skin and bones. They could hardly walk,” one neighbor said.

The Fagans said one woman who lived in the house had been hospitalized off and on for two years and was “real skinny” as a result.

The state Department of Social Services requires a board-and-care license of anyone who is commercially providing non-medical care and supervision for the elderly in a home. The Fagans said they did not have a license and did not need one. “We didn’t have no rest home,” Grace Fagan said.