Prosecutor Pushes for Execution in Orr Penalty Phase

John Orr, a former arson inspector who set a fire that burned four people to death, should be executed because “under the guise of being the protector of good, John Orr was in fact the perpetrator of evil,” a prosecutor argued Tuesday.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Sandra Flannery opened the penalty phase of Orr’s trial after Orr was convicted last week on 24 arson-related charges, including four counts of murder for igniting a fire in Ole’s hardware store in South Pasadena in 1984 that killed three adults and a 2-year-old boy.

Orr, a former Glendale fire captain, deserves the death penalty, she told the jurors, because “having seen the consequences of the Ole’s fire, he continued to set more.”

But defense attorney Edward Rucker urged the six-man, six-woman jury to show leniency in deciding whether to recommend his client be sentenced to death or life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“He is not a one-dimensional monster,” said Rucker, who plans to call a psychiatrist to explain the “type of mental condition” that would cause Orr to set the fires.

In addition to the slayings, the former Air Force veteran and father of two was found guilty of 20 counts stemming from a string of blazes set in Glendale and La Canada Flintridge in 1990-91.

The most devastating of those blazes swept the College Hills section of Glendale in June 1990, damaging or destroying 67 homes.

To counter defense testimony and the potential sympathy factor, Flannery and co-prosecutor Michael Cabral said they have called five witnesses whose College Hills homes were destroyed, as well as Luis H. Cetina, whose 17-year-old brother, Jimmy, died in the Ole’s blaze.

Cetina testified his brother was a high school center fielder with dreams of making it in the big leagues and enough talent to catch the eye of a Chicago Cubs scout. Jimmy’s death caused lasting pain to the family of six brothers and sisters, according to Cetina, who told of losing so much weight his waist dropped by four sizes after the fire.

Choking back tears, Cetina also told the court his father would escape to the backyard to try to cry where the others in the family could not hear him. “But there were seven of us,” Cetina said. “You can’t hide.”

Cetina was one of four people, including fellow employee Carolyn Kraus, 26, and customer Ada Deal, 50, and her 2-year-old grandson, Matthew Troidl, killed when the Ole’s store fire broke out shortly after 8 p.m. on Oct. 10, 1984.

During the five-week trial, prosecutors introduced the manuscript of an unpublished novel, written by Orr, in which the main character, a firefighter who is secretly an arsonist, uses a slow-burning incendiary device to set fire to a Pasadena hardware store called “Cal’s,” which kills several employees as well as a woman and her young grandson.

Orr has been in custody since 1991 and is already serving a 30-year federal prison sentence for arson. He was convicted in 1992 of three federal arson counts stemming from a series of hardware store blazes in the San Joaquin Valley. The next year he pleaded guilty to causing three additional blazes, including a 1990 fire at a Builders Emporium in North Hollywood and two others near Atascadero in 1989.

As the penalty phase continues, prosecutors told the court, they intend to introduce evidence Orr set four more fires and call other members of the victims’ families to testify.

But Superior Court Judge Robert J. Perry warned he would not allow “emotion to overcome the proceedings.”

* MIKE DOWNEY: John Orr’s lawyers call his novel “pure fiction.” But it is more like pure evil. A3