Husband’s Suspicions Led to Killings, Police Say

The father arrested Tuesday on suspicion of immolating his wife and six children as they slept confessed to the slayings and said he intended to kill them all, even the children, because “they were a product of the wife,” police said Wednesday.

The mass slaying was the climax of an obsession that Jorjik Avanesian had with his wife--who he thought took aphrodisiacs to keep her sexually aroused for other men--going back to their home in Iran where he served a prison term for trying to stab her to death, according to police, acquaintances and Avanesian’s sister.

Avanesian’s action was “premeditated for some time,” said Police Lt. Raymond Edey, the result of “ongoing disagreements” of long standing.

“He was very calm, very cool, very collected” while describing to police how he spread gasoline as his family slept and then turned the one-bedroom apartment into a smoke-filled 1,200-degree inferno, Edey said.

“He verbalized very meticulously what he had done. . . . He had full knowledge of what he was doing and what the end results were going to be.”

Avanesian himself described setting the fire in Wednesday’s edition of Asre Emrooz, a Persian-language newspaper in Encino where he went after the fire and was arrested. In that account, Avanesian denied he meant to harm his three sons and three daughters, ages 4 to 17.

He said he intended to die in the flames himself, changed his mind, and then fled the apartment without realizing his family was dying.

“I intended to put my house on fire, including myself,” the paper quoted Avanesian as saying in a translation commissioned by The Times. “Unfortunately, the large tin can of gas hit the wall and when I struck the matches, I myself caught fire.

“At this time, one of my daughters awoke and perceived that my hands had caught fire. The look of the child dissuaded me from repeating the setting of fire to the house and I then rushed to the street.”

Avanesian told the newspaper’s publisher he went there after the fire so he could give an account of the event in his native language, which is called Farsi by some speakers and Persian by others. Of Armenian descent, Avanesian lived most of his life in Iran--as ancient Persia is now called--and immigrated with his family to Turkey, where they lived for more than a year until coming to Glendale last October.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office filed seven counts of murder and one of arson Wednesday against Avanesian, 40, alleging special circumstances that make him eligible for the death penalty. Killed in the fire were his children, Roland, 4; Romic, 6; Rodric, 8; Ranika, 10; Rita, 16, and Roobina, 17.

Avanesian, who was being held without bail in the jail ward at County/USC Medical Center, is scheduled to be arraigned this morning.

Ghader Jason Mirsaeid, a Farsi-speaking investigator for the Nick Harris private detective agency in Van Nuys, said that Avanesian tried to hire him to trail his wife, Turan, who went by the name Susana in Glendale.

When they met in a Glendale restaurant 11 days before the fire, Avanesian said he wanted evidence to help him divorce his wife and have her deported so he could keep the children, Mirsaeid said.

He alleged that his wife was unfaithful, took a drug that increased her sexual desires, and may have encouraged his oldest daughter to have sex with a man, Mirsaeid said.

Mirsaeid said Avanesian was upset because his sister and his brother-in-law were on his wife’s side, saying she was doing nothing wrong.

Avanesian also said he had served a prison term in Iran for stabbing his wife, said Mirsaeid, an account repeated by Avanesian to Glendale police and by Avanesian’s sister to reporters.

Mirsaeid said he turned down the job because he regarded Avanesian as paranoid and dangerous. “He was so calm and normal when talking about how he had stabbed her before,” the private detective said.

When he heard the news of the fire on the radio early Tuesday afternoon, Mirsaeid said, he immediately drove to the home, where he had gone with Avanesian after they met.

Standing by the fire-scarred building, “I was very shocked,” Mirsaeid said. “I wanted to cry. I remembered standing outside talking to him and seeing the daughter walking to school. It was very tragic. I left very quickly.”

Police said Avanesian’s sister, Maro Ovanesyan, who lives five blocks from her brother’s apartment, told them he had been imprisoned in Iran for attempting to kill his wife.

Ovanesyan remained secluded with relatives and friends Wednesday, but a cousin who visited her described her as angry at her brother and devastated by the loss of her sister-in-law, nieces and nephews.

“Everyone’s crying; they’re very, very sad,” said the cousin, Nagapet Avanesian. “Everyone’s angry at George. It was seven people that are gone. It’s like Hitler.”

He said funeral arrangements had not been made and that the family was too upset to make those plans.

An interpreter who interviewed Avanesian for Glendale police said he told officers that he came to the United States as a refugee. However, a spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service said Wednesday that agents were unable to locate any records of Avanesian’s entry into the United States.

Asked if a person with a criminal record could be admitted as a refugee, spokesman Rico Cabrera said that determination is made by U.S. consular officials outside the country, rather than by INS officials here.

Soon after his arrival in the U.S., Avanesian came to the attention of local authorities when his wife filed a domestic violence complaint. On Nov. 4, she accused him of throwing a chair at one of the children and later brandishing a knife.

Rather than filing charges, the district attorney’s office ordered Avanesian, his wife, and one of his daughters to attend an office hearing in January, said Sandi Gibbons, spokeswoman for the district attorney. She said the hearing officer, Dale Bootow, described the couple’s behavior as cordial, saying they held hands during the interview.

Bootow referred the couple to counseling at the Armenian Relief Society and Social Service Center in Pasadena, Gibbons said, but did not have the power to compel them to go there.

The office hearing program, begun in 1976, deals with criminal situations in which there is insufficient evidence to file a charge, or where the case is not worth the court time required to prosecute, Gibbons said.

Gibbons declined to say specifically why the Avanesian case went to the hearing officer but said more serious cases have been resolved by such hearings.

Police said Seboh Shabanari, Avanesian’s cousin, offered to help authorities on Wednesday and ultimately identified the bodies using investigators’ photos from the burned apartment.

At Glendale High School, where the two oldest girls attended 10th and 12th grades, psychologists counseled dozens of students throughout the day. The school had three counselors on hand and will continue to offer their services today.

“Students came in groups, some cried and they were all in shock,” said Armine G. Hacopian, a Glendale Unified School District counselor who spoke to the students in English, Armenian and Persian. “They [the students] said the girls were wonderful . . . and they didn’t know how this could have happened.”

Times staff writer Doug Smith and correspondent Steve Ryfle also contributed to this story.

* ARMENIAN REACTION: Community explores stresses faced by immigrants. A3