A Family’s Ordeal : Survivors Angered by Deal That Will Free Arson Suspect

Juan Zuniga, who lost five family members in a 1991 arson fire at a Watts housing project, struggled to find the words to express his dismay that a man who has admitted helping commit the crime will walk out of jail a free man, probably next month.

“He has no right to leave prison,” was all Zuniga could say through an interpreter.

Other survivors of the fire were outraged and scared.

“I’m not in favor of this,” Juan’s wife, Guadalupe, said in a recent interview. “I’m afraid he will come back to harm us.”

The Zuniga family learned last week that prosecutors agreed in January that Frank Villareal, 29, could plead guilty to manslaughter charges in exchange for his testimony against two others charged with setting the fire. As part of the agreement, Villareal will be placed on probation at the end of the trial, which began Monday.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Sterling E. Norris defended the plea arrangement, saying that Villareal is the least culpable of the three and is needed to solidify the prosecution’s case against Harold Mangram, 48, and Victor Spencer, 29. Only Villareal, Norris said, can link the defendants to setting the fire.

Norris said Villareal admitted that he saw the defendants struggling to pour gasoline through the mail chute of the Zunigas’ townhouse and hastily made a cardboard funnel that got the job done.

In their most extensive interview since the fire, Juan and Guadalupe Zuniga and their relatives said the plea arrangement was another of the disappointments that have come in the fire’s aftermath.

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The family, bitterly critical of the Housing Authority of the city of Los Angeles, which operates Jordan Downs, had filed a lawsuit accusing the agency of negligence and placing them in a dangerous environment. In April, a judge agreed with the Housing Authority that there was no grounds for the suit. The Zunigas are appealing that decision.

As late as the day before the fire, Guadalupe Zuniga said, she asked a Housing Authority employee to transfer her family to another project so they would be free of the drug users and dealers who used their front porch as a hangout.

She said she was told that security concerns did not justify such an action.

Prosecutors contend that Mangram and Spencer are drug users who set the fire to ingratiate themselves with the dealers, who had made known their irritation with the Zunigas.

“But for the Housing Authority refusing to move them, no one would have died out there,” said Mercedes Marquez, a lawyer who is representing the family.

Lawyers for the Housing Authority declined to comment.

The interview with the Zunigas and other fire survivors was held in Marquez’s office because the family does not want their whereabouts to become widely known.

Juan and Guadalupe Zuniga said they plan to move back to Mexico as soon as they have testified. Since a week after the fire, they have been living in another housing project, having secured a transfer after the fire.

In filing its lawsuit, the family had hoped to recover unspecified damages for its losses. In addition to Juan and Guadalupe Zuniga, the alleged injured parties include 13 members of the couple’s extended family, who contend that they suffered as a result of the harassment and fire.

Family members say Juan Zuniga is now a ghost of his former self, unable to work as a master carpenter because of physical and psychological injuries he suffered in the blaze. Other family members are similarly affected, they said.

In court papers, the Housing Authority successfully contended that it and the city, which was also named as a defendant, are immune to such lawsuits and have no obligation to provide security to project tenants.

The papers noted that the Zunigas’ three-bedroom townhouse was leased for six tenants, but that on the morning of the fire, far more people were living there. Whatever responsibilities it had to provide services, the agency said, they did not include people who were not in the lease.

The dead included Marta Zuniga Lopez, 22, the daughter of Juan and Guadalupe Zuniga, all her children, Veronica, Claudia and Juan Carlos, ages 1 to 5 years, and 78-year-old Margarita Medina Hernandez, Guadalupe Zuniga’s mother. Seventeen people were in the home when it was set afire.

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According to the Zunigas, their ordeal began in June, 1991, when they moved from private housing in East Los Angeles to Jordan Downs.

Guadalupe and Juan Zuniga had immigrated to the United States from Mexico three years earlier to be nearer their adult children.

Marquez maintains that the family was the victim of a campaign of harassment and terror at Jordan Downs because their front porch had long been used by drug dealers and users. To compound their problems, many of their neighbors resented the Zunigas because they were assigned to a large townhouse that was desired by many longtime residents living in smaller apartments.

The Zunigas said they were unaware of these issues when they moved in.

To get out their front door, they recalled, they often had to step over people smoking or selling crack cocaine. If they complained, they said, they were verbally assaulted and threatened. The family stopped using the front door altogether.

The crack smoke outside the door often would get so thick, they said, that it would come through the mail chute, intoxicating the children and making them sick.

The family said it requested, almost daily, to be transferred.

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A month before the fire, Juan Zuniga was badly beaten and robbed. When an employee of the Housing Authority visited him afterward and the people who hung out on the front porch saw him leaving, the family’s situation worsened, family members said, because they were regarded as informants.

By the time of the fire, the Zunigas were virtually prisoners in their own home, they said, afraid to leave windows open, even in the worst summer heat.

Juan Zuniga and his wife took to sleeping in the kitchen so they would hear anyone who tried to intrude.

The couple was asleep in the kitchen in the early morning hours of Sept. 7, 1991, when Juan Zuniga was awakened by noises at his front door.

“When I opened it,” he said, “there were two men there and another one, who had his back turned, was behind them.”

Alarmed, he closed the door and went to get a gun to protect himself, he said.

As he walked back toward the door, he heard liquid gurgling through the mail chute and suddenly, he said, the door exploded in flames.

Juan Zuniga described the next moments as terror-filled as he rushed outside through a kitchen door in an unsuccessful attempt to catch the arsonists, then ran back inside to rouse his sleeping family.

At one point, he encountered a stranger in his smoke-filled kitchen and shot him. The man, who survived, was a neighbor who had run over to help the family.

Zuniga and other neighbors later rescued some of the eight children in the home by passing them through windows. Other family members escaped down ladders rushed to the burning dwelling by neighbors.

The five who died were found in the same upstairs bedroom, some under piles of clothing they apparently had tried to use as protection from the flames.

At the time, some Jordan Downs tenants told reporters that the fire was racially motivated. But prosecutors and defense attorneys have said that race was not a factor.