Death of a Legend : Fire Destroyed the House, but Not Memories of Joe Gutierrez

Joe Gutierrez, big-shouldered and big-hearted, was a legend on Longworth Avenue. He would help anybody, any time, especially the homeless who wandered over to his house from the nearby railroad tracks.

Last week, that house was destroyed by a fire that authorities say was deliberately set. Gutierrez, 66, was found dead inside, and Orville Adrian Evans, 35, a transient, was arrested the next day and booked on suspicion of murder.

Known as “Pop” or “Chino,” Gutierrez often invited the homeless--including Evans, neighbors say--into his three-bedroom house to eat or sleep.

Joe Gutierrez Jr. said he was concerned about his father’s hospitality. “I always used to tell him, ‘Pop, watch who you let in the house,’ and he’d say, ‘It’s OK, they’re just hungry.’ ”

“I don’t know, it’s crazy,” the son said. “I can’t understand why homeless people could do that to him when he went out of his way to take care of them.”

An official with the county district attorney’s office said that charges have not been filed but that the Sheriff’s Department is continuing to investigate. Evans, who was convicted of arson in January, 1992, remains in custody for violating probation, officials said.

Deputy Joseph Raffa, one of the investigators, would not comment other than to say that Joe Gutierrez Sr. died of smoke inhalation. “Murder-arson is suspected,” Raffa said.

Tuesday morning, more than 200 mourners nearly filled Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Paramount. Amid the tears were anger and concern.

“He was lying on his back in a doorway when they found him,” Henry Gutierrez, 56, said of his brother. “There’s no way a man could be lying flat on his back when he’s trying to get out of a fire. He had to be (unconscious) for some reason. And he and the dog were sidekicks--wherever Joe went the dog went.”

Reno, a black Labrador, was found dead in a closet.

On the day before the funeral, the burned stucco house was cordoned off with yellow tape. In front was the dead man’s rusty old pickup truck filled with bread. Bread crusts littered the front yard, for Joe Gutierrez Sr. also fed the sea gulls. It was a short flight for them to Gutierrez’s yard from their perch atop the nearby Albertson’s on Firestone Boulevard.

Joe Gutierrez Jr., 41, and his wife, Diane, 40, walked into the burned home he grew up in. He was somber-faced and wore a white T-shirt. She was barefoot.

“All of us adults were kids on this street, and everybody knew Pop,” said Gutierrez, who now lives across the street. Diane Gutierrez had been one of the kids too, living in the same block as her future husband.

It is a tight-knit Norwalk street where people often left their doors unlocked. “We’re all connected in one way or another,” Diane Gutierrez said.

One of their friends, Robert Kuhn, 39, who grew up on the block and still lives there, came into the house to share some memories with the Gutierrezes.

“He’s a legend on this street,” Kuhn said of the dead man. “He used to go to Albertson’s and get the day-old cakes and bread and give it to people who needed that stuff. He’d even get flowers and give them to all the ladies on the street.”

Joe Gutierrez Sr., a native of Paramount, was only 5 feet 8 inches tall, but husky. He worked in the boiler room of a laundry company but was forced by asbestosis to retire early. He and his former wife, Alice Smith, though divorced, remained friends, and she often stopped by to check on him, Diane Gutierrez said. He talked in a loud voice, usually wore a smile, and was always doing things for people, working on their cars, making them wrought-iron fences.

“Jack of all trades,” his daughter-in-law said. “He made screen doors for everybody on this block. I’ve got one.”

“He used to give my kids lunch money when I was going through a divorce and was laid off work,” Kuhn said.

“He was always trying to teach you something,” his son said. “He learned everything from the library to become a steam engineer. And all of his trades his father taught him, he passed on to us.”

The older Gutierrez worked with his hands, a skill that many of the residents of Longworth Avenue depend on to make a living. Kuhn repairs elevators. Joe Gutierrez Jr. is a construction worker. Two other sons now living elsewhere also learned trades--Leonard Gutierrez is a tree trimmer; Rick Gutierrez, a welder.

“He taught us all how to weld,” Kuhn said. “And how to kick a football. We’d have games in the street, even up to a couple of years ago. We’d say to him, ‘You were an All-American, huh?’ and he’d say, ‘Naw, I was an all-Mexican.’ ”

The house, built in the 1950s, was blackened and smelled of smoke. The contents were charred rubble. A hole in the roof revealed patches of blue sky. There had not been much furniture, mostly workbenches and tool cabinets, because Joe Gutierrez Sr. used the house mainly as a shop--he often welded there.

When the fire broke out Jan. 27, it was about 10 p.m. From across the street, Diane Gutierrez heard a homeless woman “going hysterical outside the gate.” She said she had seen the woman with Evans several times.

As the Gutierrezes and other neighbors ran to the burning home, flames shot out the windows.

“Everybody was looking for a way in, but there was just no way in,” Joe Gutierrez Jr. said. “The fire was just intense. Me and Robert went in the back yard and looked in the den, and there was only smoke in there.”

As he talked, he stood in what had been called a den, a room at the rear of the house that now held melted tools and welding rods. His father was found in the kitchen, near the entrance to the den.

“We broke this sliding glass door and tried to get in this way,” Joe Gutierrez Jr. said. “As soon as we did that, all of the flames from the kitchen and the front room just gushed out at us. I guess these (acetylene) tanks went, because five seconds after we busted the door, big balls of fire started rolling in here. But within that five seconds, I went down on the ground there to get away from the flames. . . .”

He began to cry and gasp as if still choked with smoke:

“My dad was lying there, and I thought we might have a chance to come and get him, but then the other explosion started. . . .”

In the house that the city has ordered torn down, Diane Gutierrez walked across the sooty floor and hugged her husband.

After the funeral Mass, the flag-draped casket was taken from the church. Behind it, in a wheelchair, was Socorro Gutierrez, Joe Gutierrez Sr.’s 87-year-old mother.

Robert Kuhn was gathering up the pictures of the Longworth Avenue legend. They had been displayed on a table beneath stained-glass windows in the front of the church, which now smelled of incense.

Kuhn said he had seen Evans--a slim, bearded man who didn’t say much--go into Joe Gutierrez’s home several times in recent months, but that never surprised Kuhn. “Chino wouldn’t turn anybody down,” he said. “Sometimes after a couple of beers he’d fall asleep, and when he woke up, his wallet or some of his tools would be gone.”

Now it was his life that was gone, and what was left were the photos of Chino with his family. Kuhn looked at each one but could not linger long--a mortuary director gently told him that another funeral was moving right in.

There was a long procession to All Souls Cemetery in North Long Beach; it seemed like everyone from the Longworth neighborhood was in it.

Back in Norwalk, Joe Gutierrez Sr.’s truck was still parked with its load of bread in front of his home. But the sea gulls atop Albertson’s, seeing no sign of the man himself, didn’t come.