Witness Says Man Ignored His Family’s Dying Cries

The Glendale man charged with setting a fire that killed his wife and six children last month ignored his family’s screams and repeated pleas for help from a would-be rescuer as flames consumed their apartment, according to grand jury testimony obtained Monday.

Steven Wilcox, a professional car repossessor who was working nearby the morning of the fire, testified that he heard an explosion followed by shrieks “of desperation” coming from the apartment and rushed to try to get the occupants out. He said he was shaking the building’s locked front door when Jorjik Avanesian walked by, ignoring his frantic call for assistance getting inside.

“As he came towards the door, I was yelling to him, ‘There’s a fire. People are hurt. Let me in, please,’ ” Wilcox said. Avanesian, who speaks little English, acknowledged him only with eye contact, Wilcox said, and “he appeared not to like the fact that I saw him.”

Wilcox gave an emotion-filled account of his unsuccessful rescue efforts Feb. 6 at the building in the 1300 block of East Harvard Street to the county grand jury that last month indicted Avanesian, 40, on seven counts of murder and one count of arson in connection with the blaze that killed his wife, Turan, 37, and six children, ages 4 to 17.

A partial transcript of the secret proceedings was obtained by The Times, although a Superior Court judge ordered some “inflammatory” testimony sealed on the grounds that it might make it harder to select an impartial jury if it were published.

The sealed portions include the opening and closing statements of the prosecutor trying the case and the testimony of a Glendale police officer who investigated the case.

Police maintain that Avanesian, an Armenian-Iranian immigrant who came to California last October, intentionally set his family’s one-bedroom apartment on fire with gasoline out of a jealous rage directed against his wife. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges, although he admitted setting the blaze to police and to the editor of a Persian-language newspaper based in Encino within hours of its occurrence.

But in a jailhouse interview published last weekend in the Glendale News-Press, Avanesian offered another explanation, claiming that the fire was accidentally set by a drug dealer with whom he said his late wife consorted as a prostitute and then pinned on him by corrupt police.

“I came home that night to ask my wife who the drug dealers were and why she had brought drugs into our home,” the newspaper quoted Avanesian as saying. “And when I got out the gasoline to scare her into telling me--and I only wanted to scare her--one of the men she was sleeping with jumped out and hit me, kicking over the gasoline and burning her.”

Avanesian told the News-Press that fear caused him to flee the scene, while concern that his children’s reputations would be tarnished by their mother’s alleged behavior prompted his confession to the Persian-language newspaper.

Testimony from Wilcox and five other witnesses who appeared before the grand jury offers little support for Avanesian’s recent version of the deadly events. The witnesses included a Glendale Fire Department arson investigator, who testified that traces of gasoline, as well as several unburned pots of fuel, were found throughout the dwelling, and Avanesian’s sister, who told the grand jury that her brother showed up at her apartment four blocks away with a burned face and hands. The sister phoned authorities, but Avanesian left before they arrived.

Other witnesses included the Glendale homicide investigator whose job it was to catalog the condition of the victims, who died of burns and smoke inhalation. Avanesian’s 4- and 6-year-old sons, Roland and Romic, were found in a bedroom with their 16-year-old sister, Rita. The mother, Turan Avanesian, was found sitting on the bathroom floor next to her 17-year-old daughter, Roobina, and a partially filled bathtub holding the bodies of daughter Ranika, 10, and son Rodric, 8.

Witness Wilcox described for the grand jury his frantic attempts to get into the smoke-filled apartment after hearing “large shrills, shrieks” coming from inside. He said he ran to the front of the building after determining that entering through a side window where smoke and flames were visible would be too dangerous. That was when he first ran into Avanesian, he said.

His pleas for help went unanswered, Wilcox testified. “He [Avanesian] passed by me.”

Unable to get into the building, Wilcox said he ran to the building’s underground garage seeking another entrance and spied Avanesian a second time. “He saw me again and just turned. That’s when I lost contact, visual contact with him,” Wilcox said.

Wilcox said that after he ran back to the other side of the building, he heard one more shrill cry from the apartment and “that’s it.”

“It wasn’t a ‘help’ or anything. It was just a high shrill shriek, like somebody was in pain,” he said.