Blaze of Glory

The following excerpt is adapted from the book “FIRE LOVER: A True Story,” by Joseph Wambaugh. Copyright 2002 by Joseph Wambaugh. To be published April 30 by William Morrow and Co., an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

PROLOGUE

It wasn’t until this past January that, with one final DNA test, Los Angeles finally closed the book on a unique criminal investigation and prosecution. This massive inquiry involved John Orr, whom a U.S. government serial-arson profiler at the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes had dubbed “probably the most prolific American arsonist of the 20th century.”

California arson investigators would concur that this case was like nothing seen before, transforming the methods of those who scan fire scenes for that elusive “point of origin.” Arson sleuths were forced to consider possibilities that had seemed unthinkable prior to an unprecedented series of incendiary fires that blazed across Central and Southern California for many years and ended with Orr’s arrest in 1991. When it all began is anyone’s guess, but the flames would never be damped for those who had been psychically seared by the inferno.

Perhaps an arbitrary point of origin for this story might be found in the quiet suburb of South Pasadena, on the evening of Oct. 10, 1984, during the World Series.

CHAPTER 1 CALAMITY

South Pasadena is a small city of some 20,000 residents who live within three square miles of mostly aging homes and limited commercial property. Many of the houses were built in the 1920s, the heyday of California Mission-style architecture, before the Great Depression stifled home building. Neighboring Pasadena, host to the famous Rose Parade, continued building luxury homes well into the 1930s, some of them gems of California style, all in need of periodic renovation. A good place for homeowners to buy materials to refurbish those old houses was at Ole’s Home Center on Fair Oaks Avenue, an 18,000-square-foot building in a strip mall, three blocks from the town’s only fire station.

At 7:30 p.m. that October evening, Billy and Ada Deal and their 2 1/2-year-old grandson, Matthew William Troidl, arrived in Ole’s parking lot. Matthew immediately spotted the neighboring Baskin-Robbins and wanted ice cream. His grandfather promised him they would have their treat after they finished shopping, and they walked through the entry door.

Working in the housewares department that evening was 17-year-old Jimmy Cetina. He was a high school senior and a talented athlete. In fact, this varsity center fielder was being scouted by the Chicago Cubs to play double-A ball. He had Latino good looks and had recently entered a Bullock’s department store modeling competition, and won it.

Doubtlessly, he would rather have been some other place than at Ole’s Home Center on that October evening, especially during the World Series, but there were seven children in his family who had to look for empty bottles and cans to exchange for deposits if they wanted to buy sports equipment. He needed this job.

Billy and Ada Deal knew that the near-empty store was about to close so they decided to split up and shop separately to save time. Billy wanted to buy some cheap two-by-fours, so he headed for the lumber display between the north and south interior fire doors. Ada said she was going to the paint department.

Carolyn Krause was working in the paint department that evening, so she may well have seen the 50-year-old grandmother pushing her grandson Matthew William in a shopping cart. Carolyn Krause was married to an LAPD lieutenant and had two young children of her own. She may have heard Matthew asking when he was going to get his ice cream. And someone else who was in that store may have heard him, too. Or perhaps not. This issue would be later debated in courts of law.

It had been a long shift for Jim Obdam. The young clerk had been working in the hardware department all day and into the evening. Just after 8 p.m. he heard something over the public-address system, but couldn’t make out what had been said. He was headed for the front of the store, toward the south aisle, and there he was astonished to see a column of dark smoke rising from a display rack, all the way to the ceiling.

Obdam hurried toward the west end of the store, looking for customers. He saw people heading toward the exits, but still was not alarmed when he arrived at the paint department.

“Are there any more people in your section?” he asked Krause.

She answered, “I’ll check my area!” And then she rushed through the department looking for stragglers.

Still, nobody was alarmed. Nobody had seen any fire, just that column of dark smoke. In fact, Obdam found two people browsing in hardware, looking at tools. He told them to leave the store at once.

And then he encountered a middle-aged woman with a small child in a shopping cart. Ada Deal was looking at merchandise on an end cap at the foot of the aisle. “We’ve got to leave the store,” Obdam told her. “But don’t be alarmed.”

Ada put some merchandise into the cart behind her grandson. Obdam hurried down the north aisle toward the main part of the store, but when he looked around, Ada hadn’t followed, so he went back.

“You should probably leave the cart here,” he said, more forcefully. “Take the child and let’s go!”

And then he headed toward the front of the store, assuming that Ada and her grandson were following behind him. He was near the north fire door, about two aisles away when he looked back toward that column of smoke. But it was no longer a cloud. It was a wall of flame. It was bright orange and raging. Then he noticed the north fire door had closed. That steel door had dropped down.

When he turned to look for the woman and child he heard a popping noise and the lights went out. And Obdam suddenly felt alone and trapped.

A bell chimed in the lumber area: “ting ting ting.” that’s how Billy Deal described it. And there was an unintelligible announcement. He thought that the store was closing so he looked at his watch. It was 8:05 p.m. Yes, it must be a closing announcement, he thought. But then a peculiar thing happened. A young man on a forklift jumped off the vehicle and cried, “My God, it’s a fire!” And he took off running.

Billy looked around. He couldn’t see what the young man was getting excited about. There was nothing. But suddenly some people ran through the fire door and yelled, “Get outta here! There’s a fire!”

Billy peered through that door, that fireproof barricade toward the west side of the store, and he saw a big cloud of smoke in the center of the space. He ran toward the south fire door searching for Ada and Matthew, and when he got there the cloud behind him had turned into a wall, a wall of very black smoke.

Billy Deal screamed, “Ada!”

He ran toward the entrance doors that he and his wife and grandson had passed through a half hour before, and saw that a fire engine was arriving.

In the darkness, Jim Obdam battled panic. He was all alone in the smoke and heat. He knew there were steps to an emergency exit in the back stock room. He couldn’t see, and hoped he could feel the steps, but his thoughts were fragmenting, and he began praying. Then he remembered a fire exit in the hardware department in the far northwest corner, if he could only find the far northwest corner.

He staggered to the back wall and duck-walked his way along, feeling the wall and feeling merchandise, feeling anything to guide him. He was holding his breath, low to the floor, and he dropped even lower, desperate for the same oxygen that the fire craved. He was just about to give up. He couldn’t go any farther. When he suddenly realized he was six feet from the emergency exit, he felt an energy rush and he lunged, pushing the bars, activating the alarm. And he was out.

But though the hungry flames couldn’t reach him, the trailing heat did. He was outside, but he felt as though he were still inside. It was hot and he was burning. Obdam, covered head to foot with soot, ran toward the front of the store, anxious to call his parents to tell them he was all right, but when he touched his hand to his burning wrist, the flesh fell off onto the pavement.

Anthony Colantuano, an employee in the electrical department, had been at his workbench at 8:04 p.m. when a voice screamed, “Fire!” He spotted a fellow employee and a few customers rushing down an aisle toward the south fire door and he stopped them, herding them toward the fire exit in the electrical department.

“Come with me!” he yelled. “The door is over here!”

As they exited the store, he looked back and it was like wading through surf when a mountainous breaker is roiling toward you. But this wave was made of fire. It was heaving and cresting and roaring.

When he later described it, he said, “It was coming, coming fast toward us. The flame. The fire. Everything.”

They were literally blown outside by a flashover--the instant burn of gases and smoke, when the carbon that is smoke burns hotter than 1,000 degrees and the contents of a room erupt in flame and no living thing survives. People, smoke, flames, merchandise, everything, was blasted through the door into the cool autumn night.

The six men of Engine Co. 81 had been just settling in front of the TV, waiting for the start of the World Series game between the San Diego Padres and Detroit Tigers, when they heard the police dispatch a “possible 904,” the police term for a fire. They were still sliding the pole when the alarm bell went off and they figured it was more than a “possible.”

Since Ole’s Home Center was only three blocks from the station, the fire company arrived in a few minutes. The fire captain in charge, William Eisele, didn’t think there’d be much to this one. There was no glow or header of smoke above the roof line indicating a major structure fire. All he saw was some haze in the air. He thought it might be a dumpster or maybe a vehicle fire.

But when the firefighters leaped from their engine, Eisele saw flames rolling out the southwest door. When he got close to that door, the fire actually hissed at him. The flames emitted very little smoke and had a bluish-green tint from the merchandise--polyurethane foam, they would later learn--that produced a strange sound, the hissing.

The firefighters prepared to attack those flames, only three feet off the floor but lapping out the door, hungry for oxygen, lunging against the overhanging facade, climbing up.

Never in his 54 years had Billy Deal been so thirsty. he was parched. “Just like I was in a desert,” he would later say.

Maybe Ada and Matthew had gotten out some other way, he kept telling himself. He actually made an attempt to enter the building again before being driven back. Then he joined the gathering crowd of onlookers as neighboring engine companies neared, honking and wailing. He spotted young Jim Obdam, carbon covered, running in front of the store toward other huddled employees in the parking lot who shouted to him, overjoyed to see him alive. And Billy thought, well, he got out, didn’t he? Maybe Ada and Matthew did too. Maybe. Billy ran to the fire captain and cried out that he had escaped but his wife and grandson were trapped, maybe only 10 feet inside the door.

Eisele later reported that he had all the confidence in the world that if somebody was only 10 feet inside that door he could go in and get them out, so he said to Billy, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of that!”

Eisele gathered his firefighters for a rescue attack. He ordered that they pull three folds of 2 1/2-inch hose, each fold being 50 feet long, in a try to make a quick knockdown and rescue. They charged the line with water and made their approach.

The fog nozzle was like a giant shower head designed to break up water particles and consume BTUs, drawing the heat from a fire. Because fire needs oxygen, heat and fuel to survive, the fog nozzle was meant to disrupt the fire triangle by turning heat into steam, in effect, shooting steam at the fire to lower the temperature. It was all logical, very logical.

So after sending his sixth firefighter to find and shut down utilities, especially natural gas, the captain and his men entered through the southwest door, where suddenly they were looking into a blinding orange inferno.

They tried to attack under those flames, vivid orange but with a weird blue-green tint, but they only got a few feet inside. The fire had obviously flashed over. There were no aisles, there were no people, there was nothing but fire. Everything was aflame. But now came an eerie sound commingled with the hiss of the burning foam. The battery-powered display smoke detectors were going off, one after another. And the firefighters could hear high-pitched squeals within the flames, like animals burning alive.

Eisele yelled at the nozzle man to hit the Celotex ceiling tiles, but the 225-gallon nozzle created so much steam in the super-heated air, emitted so much nozzle pressure, that it blasted the firefighters back out the door.

While other engines were still racing to Ole’s Home Center, Eisele ordered a 1 3/4-inch attack line to be brought to another entry, but learned that the fire doors had in fact rolled down and could not be pried open. The captain sent a man up to ventilate the roof because the fire had not burned through yet. When the firefighter cut the hole, flames shot into the sky, pulling heat with them in a chimney effect, but it was too little, too late. It was about seven minutes into the fire and the entire roof was perilously threatened, so Eisele had to order his firefighter back down.

And where in the hell was Engine 41, he wondered, yelling into the radio. And why did he hear an engine being radio-dispatched in the wrong direction?

What Eisele didn’t know at the time was that there was another, nearly simultaneous fire at Vons Market, only blocks from Ole’s Home Center. He would later say that it was unheard of: two South Pasadena fires in close proximity? In retail establishments, during business hours? Unheard of!

It was indeed a bizarre evening for firefighters in that part of the San Gabriel Valley. Prior to the Ole’s fire, and the fire at Vons, there had been a fire in nearby Pasadena, at Albertson’s Market on East Sierra Madre Boulevard, about seven miles from Ole’s. Arson investigator Scott McClure had arrived at Albertson’s at 6:45 p.m. and met with a battalion chief for a quick briefing.

McClure had found the point of origin easily enough, in the grocery racks piled high with bags of potato chips. At 7:45 p.m. McClure called dispatch and requested that they send arson investigator John Orr from the nearby Glendale Fire Department, probably the most accomplished arson sleuth within the several fire departments that rendered mutual aid in the area.

Orr showed up very quickly, and he explained to McClure about the volatility of potato chips, that the oils in the chips and the bag material are highly combustible, a sack of solid fuel. Orr told McClure that in his opinion, the Albertson’s fire was deliberately set, as is usually the case with fires in retail stores during business hours when customers are present. When McClure later finished his investigation and returned to his car, he heard radio reports of the disaster that was unfolding seven miles away at Ole’s Home Center, and he sped toward the scene.

When he arrived at Ole’s, Orr was already there.

After he’d ordered his firefighter off the roof of Ole’s, and after the interior attack was aborted, Eisele found Orr standing at the rear of his engine carrying a 35-millimeter camera.

“John! What’re you doing here?” Eisele asked.

“Passing by,” Orr said. “Do you mind if I shoot some pictures?”

Eisele was wishing that Orr had turnout gear in his car, but since the arson investigator was in civilian clothes and hadn’t offered to help, the fire captain assumed he did not. “Help yourself, I’ve got work to do,” Eisele said.

And while Eisele awaited the arrival of engine companies, and while Jim Obdam was led to the back of an ambulance, and while Billy Deal stood in front of Ole’s Home Center where he would remain for 22 hours, and while John Orr shot film of the conflagration, the roof caved in and a geyser of flame and sparks exploded high into the night.

In the parking lot of Ole’s, the sister-in-law of Carolyn Krause, who was a community service officer for the Glendale Police Department, saw a blue Dodge that belonged to the Glendale arson unit, and standing by the car were Orr and his partner, Police Officer Dennis Wilson.

After checking in vain at the triage area for her sister-in-law, Karen Krause approached the arson investigators and told them that Carolyn Krause was missing.

Orr told her that they would keep an eye out for Carolyn, but until the fire was suppressed nobody could get near the building except the firefighters--the implication being that a search for bodies would be hours away.

Karen Krause stayed as the rest of the family arrived, and they remained for several hours. Waiting.

The fire chief of South Pasadena was at a fire prevention class in Los Angeles when he learned of the disaster at Ole’s. Chief Gene Murry excused himself, jumped in his staff car and sped to South Pasadena, arriving close to 8:30 p.m.

Murry spotted Orr snapping photos and asked if he would assist by going to Vons to conduct an investigation. It wouldn’t be until midnight that the fire chief could declare that 125 firefighters had the Ole’s blaze under control.

Moments before the smoke was observed in the housewares department, Patricia Parham, mother of Carolyn Krause, had been at Ole’s Home Center to see her only daughter. Patricia Parham had with her Carolyn’s two children: her son, age 3, and her 2-year-old daughter. Patricia picked up her daughter’s house keys so that she could take the grandchildren home and put them to bed.

Back at Carolyn’s house, Patricia received three phone calls in quick succession--one from Carolyn’s father-in-law, one from Carolyn’s sister-in-law and one from Carolyn’s brother. When Patricia raced back to the Ole’s parking lot, the building was engulfed, and she never saw her daughter again.

Sometime after 8 p.m. the phone rang in the Cetina residence. Luis, Jimmy’s older brother, picked it up and a family friend said, “How’s your brother? Is he home?”

She seemed upset, so Luis said, “Why?”

And she said, “Because there’s a fire where he works.”

Luis’ mother asked him in Spanish what was wrong, but Luis answered, “Nothing.” Then he ran out to his car and drove to Ole’s.

When Luis reached the flaming building, he spotted an employee whose name he couldn’t remember, and he yelled, “Where’s my brother?”

The young man said, “I don’t know!” Then he added, “I think he might still be in the building!”

Luis Cetina then ran to the north side of the building and entered an open area, splashing through four inches of water where the sprinklers had activated.

Another Ole’s employee whom he recognized was standing there watching, and Luis shouted, “Where’s my brother?”

The young man said to him, “I saw him a little while ago! He went back inside!”

“Back inside ?” Luis cried.

“Yeah, there were people banging on the door! One of those fire doors that dropped down!”

Luis stayed right there, where there also used to be a laundermat at which the children would wait while their mother washed the family’s clothes. Their dad would sometimes buy them an ice cream there at Thrifty’s, when he could afford it.

It was 2 o’clock in the morning before he went home to face his mother with the truth.

Matthew Troidl was at home with his wife, Kim, and their 5-year-old daughter, Bethany. Matthew William, his 2 1/2-year-old son, was with his grandparents, and while Kim was speaking on the phone there was an emergency breakthrough on the line. It came from one of her brothers, who said that Billy Deal had called about a fire at Ole’s, and that Billy couldn’t find Ada and Matthew William.

While en route to Ole’s, Matthew Troidl and his wife kept reassuring each other that it was probably a small fire, maybe a trash can or dumpster, and that it had just caused some confusion. That’s all it was. Confusion.

But when they arrived, they saw the ventilated roof shooting flames 100 feet in the air. And there were police cars and fire engines and ambulances and chaos. But they managed to find Billy Deal in all that pandemonium and he told them the worst.

Matthew Troidl said later that he had all kinds of crazy thoughts. Maybe they’d gotten out a back door! Maybe they’d been hurt and were already at a hospital! Maybe they’d crawled up in the air-conditioning vent and were OK! Maybe. So many of them just kept thinking, maybe.

The man designated to lead a six-man investigative team the next morning was Sgt. Jack Palmer, a 25-year law- enforcement veteran assigned to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department arson explosives detail. He had investigated nearly 5,000 fires in his 12 years as an arson cop and had the resources of the county from which to draw. The tiny South Pasadena Fire Department needed vast assistance for this major disaster, and the LASD in their green jumpsuits--the Lean Green Machine-- were there in force.

Palmer immediately did his walk-around of the ravaged structure, looking for the fire’s point of origin. The west portion of Ole’s was destroyed, and the east side showed heat and water damage from sprinklers that had gone off.

Skip loaders and bulldozers were moving debris while the investigators, armed with shovels and wheelbarrows, tried to find the bodies of the four missing victims--Ada Deal and Matthew William Troidl, Carolyn Krause and Jimmy Cetina. Each time a skip loader would snare a load, investigators had to look inside for remnants of charred human beings. Palmer saw the crane remove twisted steel beams from the center of the building where the roof had collapsed, and he talked with an employee who had been called to the scene. Palmer was told that plastic products had been on display, but he was not told that there were racks full of polyurethane foam products, which, he would later say, “go like wildfire.”

After his hour-and-a-half investigation, the arson cop decided that he was unable to eliminate as a fire cause the possibility of electrical shorting in the attic area. He later said that the fire was very hard to read because there was so much potential fuel in the store, and that overhead burning, which caused ceiling material to drop and start secondary fires, could have ignited numerous hot spots.

Jim Obdam was interviewed by Palmer, and he told the investigator that he’d observed a column of dark smoke nearly two feet in diameter in the southeast part of the store, by the housewares section. But Palmer never interviewed Anthony Colantuano, the employee who not only saw smoke in that area but saw fire burning in the racks, an amazingly fast fire that chased him and created a draft of its own, blowing him out the door. Palmer did learn that there were two other retail store fires in the area on that terrible evening, and that they had both been deemed arson fires, but he decided that since they were set in potato chip racks and not polyfoam, they were probably unconnected to the Ole’s blaze. Soon, in the northern portion of the ruined building, far from where Jim Obdam and Anthony Colantuano had seen the first column of smoke, searchers found human remains.

Another fire investigator who had arrived on the scene at 7 a.m. was a supervisor with the arson-bomb unit of the California State Fire Marshal’s Office, where he’d worked for 16 years. Jim Allen, like any arson investigator, was looking for signs of the fire’s direction. Normally fire moves upward through a heat transfer process, and as it hits a surface--a wall, a ceiling--it follows the path of least resistance, spreading out in a V pattern, upward and outward. The V, or convex, pattern reveals the point of origin in a simple fire, but the Ole’s disaster had not been simple.

Allen noted that it was in the center of the building that the roof had collapsed. In addition, after temperatures in the location reached 160 degrees and melted the doors’ fusible links, both the north and south steel fire doors had rolled down as they were designed to do. The speed and heat of this fire had been astonishing, and those doors had sealed egress quickly, very quickly.

Allen had stayed about seven hours, a lot longer than Palmer, and after three or four of the aisles had been dug out, he prowled through the southeast corner with Orr, a friend and colleague who had also arrived on the scene.

Allen was of the opinion that the investigation, like the fire, was moving too fast. This fire had caught up with people trying to outrun it, so there had to have been a large load of fuel. Of course he knew that polyurethane foam is a hydrocarbon fuel that comes from a petroleum product, with the burn characteristic of petroleum, but he did not learn of its presence, not that day.

Allen didn’t like the speed with which Palmer’s conclusions were being offered, and he said so to Orr, but Orr failed to tell Allen that there had been two other retail store fires in the area the night before. And he never mentioned that he had been at the scene of one of them to consult and was the official investigator on the other. Three such fires might indicate an arson series, and play a significant role in determining the nature of the Ole’s fire.

During the early afternoon, Allen, Orr and other arson investigators were ordered out of the area by a tall sheriff’s department lieutenant who said, “We’re going into body recovery now.”

When Allen protested, the tall lieutenant said, “You can leave or run the risk of being arrested for interfering.”

In addition to never learning about the polyfoam in the southeast quadrant of the building, Allen was curtailed by the LASD investigators, who said that all witnesses would be interviewed by them.

At a meeting that then took place in Ole’s shopping center, at a Winchell’s doughnut shop, Palmer said to the huddle of fire investigators, “I can’t eliminate an electrical problem in the concealed space between the false ceiling and the roof.” Ultimately, Palmer believed it had been a “drop-down” attic fire probably caused by faulty electrical.

“We haven’t come up with a point of origin,” Allen offered. “Let’s keep going.”

“We should be unified with our conclusion,” Palmer said, but Allen replied, “I’m writing up my report that it’s an undetermined fire. I don’t know for sure if it started in the attic or where it started.”

There was no spirited debate. The dozen or so arson investigators, who had shoveled through the debris and watched the recovery of four bodies, ate their doughnuts and drank their coffee, and by their silence acquiesced to Palmer’s conclusion.

To understand the compliance of so many trained arson specialists at the fire scene, one must understand the hierarchy and class structure that divides the profession. First, there are arson investigators who have been drawn from the firefighting ranks. Although they have peace officer status, carry firearms and effect the arrests of fire-setting criminals, they are and always will be, to the other class just gun-toting firefighters who, if they depart from arson investigation, will go back to the firehouse to scrub hoses and polish chrome.

These other arson investigators, those who come from the ranks of the police service, are first and foremost cops. They are law-enforcement officers assigned to arson investigation and will be law-enforcement officers after leaving the arson ranks. Their K-9 symbol is the German shepherd, the true descendant of the wolf, not some white-and-black bag of spots that chases a fire truck.

Also, Palmer was not a cop from a town like South Pasadena or any of the other little cities that make up the foothills area and the San Gabriel Valley. He was with an agency that numbered in the thousands, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which, along with the Los Angeles Police Department, was one of the major police entities in California. The Lean Green Machine sometimes was called by critics the Mean Green Machine. Fire investigator Jim Allen, who had, early in his adult life, been a San Joaquin deputy sheriff, knew who wins in such debates between cops and firemen. So when Palmer essentially called it an accidental fire, there was not much argument. In fact, people never did speak publicly of their differing opinions, not for a long time. They all knew who the Big Dog was.

John Orr was especially angered by Palmer’s meeting and placed a call late that morning to Dennis Foote, a fellow arson investigator for the city of Los Angeles Fire Department. He asked Foote if he or some other member of the mutual aid force, the Foothill Arson Task Force Group, could respond to assist with the Ole’s inquiry.

Orr also wanted to see a file that Foote had been compiling, a file dealing with a fire series that had been occurring in Los Angeles and the vicinity for about four years. Some of those fires involved the ignition of potato chips; others involved combustible materials such as polyfoam. What they had in common was their occurrence in retail establishments during business hours, usually in the afternoon or early evening.

On one of those investigations Foote had collected a delay device that was different from most cigarette-matchbook devices. This one, or what was left of it, was a Marlboro cigarette with three paper matches attached to it by a rubber band. Such a device provided up to 15 minutes or more for an arsonist to leave a store before the burning cigarette ignited the matches, which in turn ignited flammable material around them.

When Foote arrived at Ole’s, Orr told him that there had been other fires in the area the night before, and that possibly a delay device had been used to start them. Foote put on his helmet and his rubber boots and entered Ole’s with Orr, but that area of the building was just about destroyed and the sheriff’s investigators were already finishing up. Before he left, Foote gave his file--he called it “The Potato Chip File”--to Orr.

Then, a few days later, a peculiar thing happened: A fire erupted in Builder’s Emporium in North Hollywood. It was in the polyfoam section, like so many of the others. Foote wanted another look at Ole’s, another chance to determine if the Ole’s fire could have been ignited in polyfoam products that burn violently. But it was too late. A wrecking company had cleared almost all debris from the building space.

Matthew Troidl had tried to call his parents, who lived in the Bay Area, but when his father answered, Troidl couldn’t speak. Troidl’s wife, Kim, had to take the phone and tell the older man that his grandson was dead. And Troidl couldn’t personally make the funeral arrangements for his son. He just sat in the house and rocked back and forth.

They decided to bury the two of them in the same casket, Ada Deal cradling her grandson in her arms.

The Pasadena Star News reported that more than 1,200 people packed the church for the funeral of Jimmy Cetina. The monsignor had decided to have the Mass during school hours, and the classrooms emptied. The police had to block traffic for miles down San Gabriel Boulevard for the 200 cars that drove to the cemetery.

Jimmy Cetina had applied for the job at Ole’s to help out the family with the purchase of a used white Volkswagen. They couldn’t afford insurance yet, so nobody had driven the car. It was parked in the backyard, and Jimmy had liked to sit in it and tell his family what he was going to do to fix it up. But Jimmy never got to drive it. His brother drove it behind Jimmy’s hearse in the funeral cortege. Later they sold it. His father couldn’t bear to have that white car around anymore.

If dalmatians deferred to police dogs that day at the Ole’s calamity, there were other canine cousins on the prowl, sniffing and panting and baying at the possibilities. And these could outsmell any tracking dog, or bomb dog, or dope dog, or cadaver dog that ever lived. These could simply point a nose at a headline, then raise up and smell it in the air: grief, misery, death! They were contingency-driven trial lawyers.

When all was said and done, everybody would be sued: Ole’s, its parent company, electrical contractors, subcontractors, anybody who might be willing to fork over some big bucks either through their insurance carriers or from their own pockets, or from Grandma’s sugar bowl. When the Ole’s Home Center investigation officially concluded, with the finding of probable electrical malfunction in the attic space, the trial lawyers and the defendants settled out of court for $4 million, costs that usually get passed on to consumers.

John Orr spoke to Karen Krause at the Glendale PD a few days after her sister-in-law’s funeral and said how disappointed he was that the fire had been called accidental. He told her of other such fires in home improvement companies, specifically mentioning Builder’s Emporium in North Hollywood, where a fire had been started in a polypropylene mattress but, luckily, was extinguished by the sprinkler system, with remnants of a delay device left behind.

“There should’ve been investigators present at the autopsies of the victims,” he told her. “Polypropylene may have left particles in the victims’ lungs or in their tracheas. Or there may have been gases present that were absorbed in the bodies, and it might’ve come out in a proper autopsy.”

If there had been investigators there knowing what to look for. But there were not, and now no one would ever know.

Two months after the October 1984 Ole’s calamity in South Pasadena, another disaster nearly befell that unfortunate company. The Ole’s Home Center on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena barely escaped a similar fate. A partially burned incendiary device was found by an employee.

Arson investigators called it a “signature device”: the cigarette, the three paper matches and a rubber band. It was found in a partially burned stack of polyfoam that had been scorched but hadn’t fully ignited. This signature device was known only to local arson investigators, who hadn’t publicized it, therefore it couldn’t be a copycat. Some wondered if the fire setter had graduated from potato chips to bigger targets.

Another possibility would not be considered for some time to come: by attacking the second Ole’s store, perhaps a fire setter was making a statement to the entire arson investigating community--that they had got it wrong the first time.

Epilogue: In September 1998, John Orr was sentenced to four consecutive life terms in prison without the possibility of parole for the 1984 fire at Ole’s Home Center, in addition to 20 years for other fires that damaged or destroyed dozens of homes in La Ca-ada and Glendale in the early 1990s.