Fire in Converted Watts Garage Kills 5 Children

Five children ages 1 to 9 were killed Thursday when an early morning fire trapped a sleeping family inside a converted Watts garage. Among the dead was a second-grader who was scheduled to sing at her school’s Christmas celebration just a few hours later.

The brothers and sisters perished despite their father’s desperate attempt to rescue them. Iron bars covered all the windows of the garage, which had been converted into a residence without a city permit, officials said.

Family members said the fire started just after 2 a.m. near an electric space-heater that had been left by the door on an especially chilly night.

The father, Alan Curtis, 38, rushed out with his infant girl, Altranea, his clothes smoldering. He suffered third-degree burns over 50% of his body, officials said, and was hospitalized at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in critical condition. Sabrina Burnett, the children’s mother, also escaped the blaze. Both she and Altranea were treated and released.

Alan Curtis “was like on fire, he was burned pink” when he escaped from the burning structure, said his brother, David Curtis. “He wanted to go back inside, but my dad held him back.”

The bodies of four of the children were found huddled on a couch. The fifth, a girl, was found on a mattress, her hands covering her face, family members said.

Fire investigators spent much of the day sifting through the charred remains of the home in the 2100 block of East 105th Street. No official cause had been determined by Thursday afternoon.

The residence was one of tens of thousands of illegally converted dwellings in Los Angeles County, most of them former garages, used as housing of last resort for many poor and working families. In 1987, a Times study estimated that 230,000 people were living in such homes in the county.

Los Angeles city officials acknowledged Thursday that they have long been aware of the spread of these substandard dwellings but lack a proactive program to fight it.

“We don’t want people living like this,” said Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick, who chairs the council’s Public Safety Committee. “But we could have thousands and thousands of people living on the street if they were told to vacate these premises.”

The garage where the Curtis family lived was behind the peach stucco home of Alan Curtis’ parents, separated from the main home by a concrete patio.

From accounts of family members and fire officials, it appeared that flames blocked the children from making their way through the 20-by-20-foot living area to the lone doorway.

Burnett told her family that the oldest of the children, 9-year-old Danielle, had covered her brothers and sisters with a blanket to protect them from the smoke.

Also killed were Alexis, 7, Alexandria, 6, Alan Jr., 3, and Alex, who would have turned 2 on Jan. 6, officials said.

Alexis was about to sing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” at the Thursday morning assembly at 102nd Street Elementary School. Teachers and other school staff sobbed when they were told Alexis and her two sisters, also students at the school, had died.

“Oh God! No!” cried one faculty member as hundreds of children filed out from the completed Christmas assembly. “Why?”

The sisters were described as smart and outgoing. Alexandria was at the top of her kindergarten class, said her teacher, Catherine Mims Yamaguchi.

“She was one of my better students in reading and math and everything,” Yamaguchi said. “She worked really hard. . . . She was a delightful child.”

Alan Curtis, a former standout track star at Jordan High School in Watts who now works as a barber, lived in the converted garage with his two sons, family members said. Burnett, who lived at the nearby Jordan Downs housing project, was visiting for the night with the couple’s daughters.

The temperature dropped below 50 degrees Wednesday night.

“You get a cold snap, you want to make sure the kids don’t get the flu or a cold,” said Ray Shaffer, Curtis’ brother-in-law. “The thing is to keep [the kids] warm.”

The first 911 call to police came at 2:04 a.m. A tape of the call begins with the sound of a woman and children screaming and a male dispatcher asking, “Hello? Hello? What’s happening, ma’am?”

“Is someone injured or burned?” the dispatcher asks.

“Everybody is burning up,” the caller yells. A few seconds later, she adds, “The kids are in the back burning up.”

“We’re on our way.”

“Help me, please,” the caller says, crying.

The children’s grandfather, Beecher Curtis, 68, who lives in the main house, said that after the fire started he found his son Alan sprawled on the concrete patio between the two residences, weakened by severe burns, his clothes still on fire.

“He was trying to get up and go back inside,” he said.

“Fortunately, he was as weak as he was, or I wouldn’t have been able to restrain him.”

Beecher Curtis grabbed a blanket to put out his son’s burning clothes.

“He said, ‘My kids are in there, Dad, I have to go back,’ ” the elder Curtis recalled. “I told him, ‘You can’t.’ ”

Maurice Burnett, 24, Sabrina’s son and a half brother to the deceased children, said he spoke to his mother a few hours after she was released from the hospital. She recounted to him the moments after she woke up to find the room ablaze.

“Fire was everywhere,” he said. “By the door there were big flames. My sister Danielle covered the children to keep them from getting smoke. [Sabrina] ran out to get the water hose, but the water wouldn’t turn on. The fire was so extreme, she couldn’t get back in.”

Firefighters arrived at the scene quickly, but found the garage engulfed in flames. Battalion Chief Mike Reagan said that from a distance it was not immediately clear the garage was a residence. “As soon as we pulled up, two of the burn victims told us there were people inside,” he said.

The fire was put out in 30 minutes, officials said. The bodies were removed shortly after dawn.

Lydia Garner, a cousin to the deceased children, said she helped identified the bodies at a local hospital.

“They were burned real bad,” she said. “We had to identify them by the clothes.”

By mid-morning Thursday, fire investigators were picking through the burned wreckage. Two mattresses had been reduced to lumps of twisted steel springs and melted foam. The couch where the children died was singed, as was a stack of stereo equipment.

A set of keys was still in the lock of the steel security door several hours after the fire.

As news of the tragedy spread, friends and family members filed in and out of the Curtis home, offering condolences and exchanging stories about the children. A few noted that the fire occurred on the birthday of Alan’s brother, who died two years ago in an accidental shooting.

Alan Curtis cuts hair for people in the neighborhood, working out of a recreation room attached to the garage. Family members and neighbors described him as a devoted father who would do anything for his children.

His cousin Herbert Curtis said Alan often gave his daughters a ride to school on his bike because he didn’t own a car.

“You just try so hard to make it, and he was doing what he could,” he said. “He lived for his kids.”

A Fire Department psychologist tried to protect the family from the crush of reporters descending on the home of the elder Curtis, which was undamaged in the fire. The children’s grandmother, Eralene Curtis, fainted as she was escorted away.

Inspectors from the city Department of Building and Safety said the owners of the property had applied for a permit to build a recreation room--the structure that Curtis apparently used as a barber shop--in 1975. No permit was granted for the garage conversion.

“No part of this [garage] could be used as a dwelling full time to sleep in,” said David R. Kein, an inspector with the department. He said the structure was originally a two-car garage.

It was by no means the only building without a permit in the community.

Frank Rocha, a construction contractor who has been living in the area since 1953, said at least half the neighborhood homes have some type of addition in the backyard, including campers, converted garages or more permanent dwellings.

Most of them are not up to code, he said.

“Inspectors will come by if somebody calls,” Rocha said. “But do they come regularly? No. This is Watts; a lot of things are overlooked here.”

Times staff writers Andrea Ford, John M. Gonzales and Jodi Wilgoren contributed to this story.

* WIDESPREAD DANGER: Officials bemoan prevalence of converted garages. Classmates remember victims. B1