Explosion Is Focus of Fire Probe

Suspicions deepened Friday over the origin of an explosion and fire that blew a four-story chasm in a Hollywood residential hotel and left two people dead. One of those killed was a woman who saved her two children before apparently losing her balance in a blur of heat and swirling smoke and falling to her death.

The explosion that erupted on the ground floor of the Palomar Hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard early Thursday was so powerful that it blew security bars out of windows and sent the windows flying up to 120 feet away, city officials said. Speculation grew that the blast might have been deliberately ignited or the unintended consequence of some other illegal act, such as drug manufacturing.

“The fire that took place is not the kind which was typical of a residential fire,” Andrew Adelman, general manager of the city Building and Safety Department, told the City Council. “The explosion and the speed and progress of the fire indicated something else going on.”

Although the hotel had a history of fire code violations, city officials said the building’s owner had grudgingly installed some fire safety equipment, including sprinklers and fire doors, after repeated demands by the Fire Department and the city attorney’s office. Had those improvements not been made, Adelman said, as many as 20 people might have died.

As details trickled out Friday about the deadly explosion and fire, they served mostly to pile one layer of mystery on top of another. Chief among them: What caused the explosion and who was the man whose body was found near the origin of the blast, burned too badly to be identified or fingerprinted?

Speculation focused on the missing brother of building owner Juan Jose Ortiz. The brother, who had managed the building, was not among the 50 people who emerged alive during the fire and he had still not been found Friday, according to George Sellers, a lawyer for Ortiz. He identified the brother as Juan “Arturo” Salazar.

The burned body may have to be identified using dental records, coroner’s spokesman Scott Carrier said.

But the fact that it was found near the origin of the blast and unspecified aspects of its condition helped fuel suspicions of foul play, Adelman said.

Among the possibilities being considered, according to Fire Capt. Richard Andrade, are that the blast was caused by an accident in an illegal drug lab, by the illegal storage of flammable liquids, by a natural gas leak, or by a criminal act.

The charred building stood silent and empty Friday, awaiting the formation of an investigative team that will include the FBI, local fire and police investigators and members of an elite national response team from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The ATF’s Western team, one of four such units around the country, will include as many as 20 experts in a range of fields, including arson, explosives and chemical fires, said ATF spokesman Brian Burns in Washington.

Burns said the national response teams are typically brought in to help investigate fires or explosions that cause more than $1 million in damage or significant loss of life.

Victim Was Moments From Being Rescued

The explosion at the Palomar occurred shortly before 4 a.m. Thursday in a ground-floor section of the building that contained a small church and an optics lab. Most of the damage was confined to a rear portion of the building; fire doors in hallways apparently halted the spread of the fire to the rest of the hotel, Fire Capt. Steve Ruda said.

Firefighters evacuated or rescued most of the residents of the 48-unit building. When a woman appeared at a fourth-floor window dangling her two small children, firefighters quickly raised a 35-foot ladder, which reached only to the middle of the third floor, and pulled the children to safety.

Then, as other firefighters began to swing a taller, truck-mounted ladder into place to rescue the woman, she plunged from the window to her death.

The two children, a 5-year-old girl and a 3-year-old boy, were upgraded from critical to serious condition Friday at Childrens Hospital, where they were being kept on respirators because their airways are swollen from flames and smoke.

Ruda said he studied a videotape of the mother’s death Friday and concluded that she had fallen accidentally. The firefighters could have saved her in an additional 10 to 15 seconds, he added.

“I’m sure she was enduring tremendous heat, because her body was burned on her back pretty well,” Ruda said. “As she came out of that window, the video shows a blast of heavy black smoke hit her in her face. And I think . . . at that point she had lost her balance and came out the window. It doesn’t look like she purposely panicked and jumped.”

Ruda said there also wasn’t time to inflate a cushion that might have saved the woman.

“She was dangling the children out of the window,” he said. “So the commander had to make the decision. . . . Does he make the decision to rescue them as fast as he can with the ladder . . . or take the 2 1/2, three minutes, four minutes, to let them endure what they’re enduring up there to get an air bag to inflate. So they made the decision to throw those 35-foot extension ladders.”

While the coroner’s office identified the woman as 38-year-old Norma Gallindo, friends insisted Friday that her name was Norma Villalobos Miranda. Two friends, Edith Rivas, 35, and Julio Gil, 38, said they had grown up with her in Santatecla, El Salvador.

“The kids were her life. They were like a photograph--always together,” said Gil. “Wherever she went, the kids were right there with her.”

“The only thing she wanted was to raise her children well,” said Rivas, wiping away tears. “She had such a strong temperament.”

Miranda was embarrassed by her living arrangements in the Palomar Hotel, the friends said. When Rivas was finally invited inside her friend’s tiny room, she found a small bed and a mattress on the floor, where the two children slept. There was a little stove, but no refrigerator. The children’s juice and milk were kept in bags of ice.

Gil and Rivas say Miranda had wanted to move closer to their South Los Angeles home and place her daughter in school.

“She felt alone. She wanted to move closer to us,” said Gil, Rivas’ husband. Miranda, who had worked for years as a housecleaner before the birth of her daughter, visited Rivas at a bakery around the corner from the hotel almost daily.

The last time she saw her, Rivas said, Miranda came by the bakery on Tuesday in tears, saying she had not come up with enough money to remove her belongings from storage before a deadline.

Gil and Rivas said Miranda’s only relatives in the United States were her children, their father and a cousin in Virginia. They said that in El Salvador, she is survived by her mother and two brothers, who last saw her when she left in 1987.

The Palomar Hotel fire also injured four firefighters. Two were listed in fair condition Friday at the Grossman Burn Center in Sherman Oaks.

Another who suffered a minor back injury and a fourth with a broken collarbone were treated and released, a Fire Department spokesman said.

Residents of the hotel spent Friday at a Koreatown Red Cross shelter, where initial feelings of shock began to give way to frustration.

“It’s been two days. I want to know what we’re going to do,” said 76-year-old Olivia Caravera, one of 25 hotel residents staying at the shelter on the campus of Virgil Middle School.

Most of the residents spent Friday meeting with Red Cross caseworkers, arranging housing. It is not clear when, or if, anyone will be able to return to the Palomar.

The Hollywood hotel was cited by fire inspectors as recently as last month for violations including broken smoke detectors, lack of stairwell signs and inoperative or locked fire and exit doors, city records show.

Records Show Repeated Safety Violations

The inspection records, released to The Times on Friday by the Fire Department, show that the building owner was ordered to correct the violations by Sept. 17.

He was given until November 2002 to correct other violations, according to separate court records. But some of this was made contingent on his ability to obtain financing.

The four-story complex has been repeatedly cited for similar fire safety violations dating back to 1999, the records show.

On one occasion last November, a fire inspector reported that he was unable to survey the building because he was denied access by the manager.

The records show that the owners corrected some of the 1999 violations.

“They did some of the work, but in June 2001 when we tried to go back to the building to see the condition of the building, the owner refused access to us,” said Adelman, the Building and Safety Department official.

Despite that, Ben Austin, press secretary to City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo, described the situation as one “where the system is working. Problems were identified. Everyone worked together in the city to prod the owner into action.”

The City Council voted to allocate up to $5,000 per displaced family for relocation.

The Red Cross of Greater Los Angeles, at (213) 739-5267, is accepting donations for the fire survivors.

A trust fund has been set up for the children of Norma Miranda at the Hollywood branch of Wells Fargo Bank. Donors can call (323) 463-2247 for more information.

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Times staff writers Mitchell Landsberg, Robert Lopez and Patrick McGreevy contributed to this story.