2 Children Started Apartment Blaze

Two children playing with matches in an unlocked, vacant apartment ignited the March blaze that ripped through 31 units and caused more than $1 million damage at the Ridgewood Gardens complex, fire officials announced Tuesday.

A 6-year-old La Puente boy and a 7-year-old Montebello girl confessed to their role in the March 31 fire, but there are no plans to prosecute them or seek financial damages from their parents, according to Anaheim Fire Chief Jeff Bowman.

“It’s always good news when we found out how a fire started, but we’re disappointed that it’s kids who are responsible in this case,” Bowman said, adding that parents must aggressively teach their children not to play with matches.

Investigators, citing the age of the children, declined to release their names.

The children were visiting an aunt at the complex when they found “a number of match books” left in apartment No. 86, Anaheim Fire Investigator Mike Doty said. The pair began lighting the matches, which then ignited curtains hanging in front of a sliding glass window in the unit, Doty said.

A third child, an 11-year-old cousin to the two children, was present but did not light any matches, Doty said. All three children confessed in recent days, ending a difficult investigation that had been focused on local street gang members as arson suspects, officials said.

The four-alarm fire left 17 families homeless, including the aunt whom the children were visiting, Doty said. The blaze that started on the second floor spread quickly through a common attic, and at one point a firefighter fell through the burning roof into the heart of the blaze. He emerged unscathed, however, and no other injuries were reported.

Doty said a passing comment last week by a resident led to the break in the investigation, which had stalled after interviews and lie detector tests failed to produce any solid suspects among the gangs that frequent the area.

One of the tenants re-interviewed last week “said they heard kids running up and down the halls just before the fire,” Doty said. Investigators deduced that an arsonist would not have started the blaze with a group of children close enough to be witnesses.

“We thought it was a good bet these children were involved.”

A follow-up investigation revealed that the responsible children, whose aunt lived two doors away from No. 86, had alerted family members that there was a fire, but hasty attempts to douse the growing blaze failed, Doty said.

Neither the aunt nor the parents of the responsible children were aware that they had started the fire, Doty said. The children will undergo counseling about their actions and the costly consequences, Doty said.

“These children come from good homes. Their parents are nice, their parents are cooperative and very upset about all this,” Doty said.

The presence of the match books and the unsupervised access to the empty apartment created a dangerous situation, Doty said.