On Videotape, Man Details Killing Family

The night before Jorjik Avanesian set his family’s Glendale apartment ablaze, he pleaded with God to send him a dream to keep him from becoming a murderer, he said Friday in videotaped testimony.

But when he awoke before dawn on Feb. 6, 1996, with no reply from God, he went ahead with plans to kill his wife and six children, he said.

In a videotaped interview with Glendale police hours after the fire, he said he had planned to stab his youngest children to death to spare them the pain of the flames.

“I figured the little ones, when I put gas on them, they would suffer,” Avanesian said through an interpreter on videotape. “I didn’t want them to suffer.”

On the second day of Avanesian’s murder and arson trial, jurors in Pasadena Superior Court viewed the two-hour interview while the defendant sat calmly beside his attorney.

Avanesian’s wife, Turan, 37, and their six children, ages 4 to 17, died of smoke inhalation in the fire that engulfed their Harvard Street apartment in Glendale.

Avanesian has been described by his defense attorney as “delusional,” a man who thought his wife and children were tainted by drugs, despite no evidence to those claims.

But prosecutors have raised another motive for the killings: Avanesian’s wife refused to divorce him.

Dressed in gray slacks, a light blue shirt and a blue sweater vest, the gray-bearded Avanesian, 43, appeared much older in the courtroom than on the video.

On the tape, his hair is dark brown and his face is cleanshaven. He calmly and methodically answered detectives’ questions, sometimes gesturing with his two bandaged hands that he said he had burned while setting the fire.

Avanesian described how the day before the fire, he bought a $2.50 ax and a 69-cent knife at a local store. He then filled a water container with gasoline at a filling station across the street. He returned to his apartment and hid the gasoline and weapons.

Rising at 4 a.m. the next day, he said, he poured gasoline onto a kitchen towel and went into the room where his children and wife slept. He said he lighted the towel and tossed it into the room.

“I wanted us all to die,” Avanesian told police calmly on the tape.

As flames began to spread through the room, his youngest son began to scream, he recalled.

“Did your wife or children say anything to you?” police asked him on the tape. They only cried, Avanesian replied impassively.

At one point, he said, he also decided to hide the ax because he no longer wanted to kill his family. “I thought the automatic sprinklers would go off. I thought the police would come,” he told police.

But when detectives pressed him about why he fled the apartment instead of perishing with his family as he had planned, he gave a rambling reply about being confused and “not thinking.”

At times on the videotape, as homicide investigators attempted to get him to explain why he wanted to kill his family, Avanesian talked instead about the Muslim regime giving drugs to Armenians in his former country of Iran.

Local drug dealers, he insisted, were also trying to control his family.

On Friday, Investigator Dennis Smith of the Glendale Police Department testified he found traces of gasoline on a living room rug in the family’s apartment.

Smith said he also found the ax and knife allegedly bought by Avanesian and tossed into a nearby laundry room. Fingerprints on the ax, Smith said, matched the defendant’s.

Witness Vickie Carrillo said she was at a Verdugo Road gas station on Feb. 5 when she noticed Avanesian struggling at a gas pump with the water container. She assisted him, she said, then drove off. After the fire the next day, Carrillo said, she recognized Avanesian on the TV news and notified police.

Another prosecution witness, Nancy Flack, said she stepped outside her home about 5:45 a.m. on Feb. 6 when she noticed Avanesian staring across the street.

He later turned and calmly approached her, she said, showing her his hands and asking for some oil. When she said she didn’t have any, he walked away, she said.

By then, smoke had begun to curl out of the apartment complex a street away.

Avanesian is charged with seven counts of murder and one count of arson. If convicted, he faces the death penalty or life in prison.