‘Fascination With Fire’ Led to Brutal Killing, Lawyer Says

Early one morning in 1997, just outside a 7-Eleven convenience store in San Fernando, a teenager walked up to a drunken man he did not know and kicked him in the face, breaking his jaw.

The teenager then doused the man with paint thinner and flicked a cigarette lighter.

Flames engulfed Luciano Olmeda, who suffered third-degree burns and died in a hospital later that day.

Trial opened Tuesday for Jose Manuel Carranza, 21, of Sylmar, who is charged with first-degree murder and arson in Olmeda’s death. Carranza faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Dan Damon told jurors that Carranza started fires at a Panorama City park and a San Fernando church shortly before arriving at the convenience store. He then willfully and deliberately killed Olmeda, who had been sitting against an outside wall of the store, intoxicated but “minding his own business,” Damon said.

“I looked at him and he looked at me,” Carranza told police interrogators in a taped confession Damon played for jurors. “I grabbed a lighter out of my pocket and lit him.”

Carranza’s defense attorney, Dale Rubin, said the youth has had “a fascination for fire” ever since a childhood head injury and that he was insane at the time of the crime.

Rubin told jurors he would play a videotape of a birthday party attended by Carranza when he was a little boy of 8 or 9. He was struck, accidentally, by a child swinging a bat at a pinata.

“Over the next approximately 10 years, the conduct of setting things on fire was part of Mr. Carranza’s activities,” Rubin said. According to court documents, Carranza was first arrested for arson in 1992, when he was 13 and set a fire at a school.

A neurologist will testify that Carranza suffers from brain abnormalities, Rubin said. “Inputs into Mr. Carranza’s brain, from the things he sees and the things he hears, he interprets differently from you or I would.”

San Fernando Police Department investigators testified that Carranza has admitted setting fire to Olmeda.

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In taped interviews played for the jury, Carranza offered several explanations for why he killed the Los Angeles man.

Carranza first told police he knew Olmeda and had acted in self-defense, after the man threatened him. But police found inconsistencies in that story.

Carranza then said he had had an argument with his girlfriend.

“I was frustrated, angry . . . one thing led to another.. . . I was confused,” Carranza said in a 1997 taped interview played in San Fernando Superior Court before Judge Meredith C. Taylor. “I had to take my frustrations out. I didn’t know how to do it the right way.”

Olmeda had been sitting in front of the convenience store for at least an hour and half, according to statements and testimony. About 3:45 a.m., Carranza allegedly walked toward him with a can of paint thinner in hand and flicked a small flame.

“Why did I do something like that? I don’t even know,” Carranza said in the police tape.