Father Arrested in Asphyxiations of His Children

Shortly after his release from a Whittier hospital Friday, a Pico Rivera man was arrested for allegedly igniting a charcoal grill inside his house that killed five of his six children while they slept.

Handcuffed and wearing a light blue hospital gown, Adair Garcia was wheeled out of Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital and released to sheriff’s homicide investigators.

Garcia, who had gone through two days of treatment for severe carbon monoxide poisoning, was booked on five counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. He is expected to be arraigned as early as Monday.

Garcia, 30, was hospitalized after he and his children were found unconscious in their home in the 9600 block of Washington Boulevard on Wednesday morning by his mother-in-law, who was going to baby-sit.

The night before, Garcia tucked his children into bed, lighted the barbecue grill and allowed it to burn for hours, said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Don Bear.

Investigators believe that Garcia was depressed about his rocky marriage. His wife, Adriana Arreola, had left the house for at least a week before the killings, Bear said.

Many, including neighbors, did not see any warning signs, and Bear said his first glimpse of the house Wednesday did not suggest a troubled family.

Pictures of the smiling Garcia children are proudly displayed on the living room walls. According to teachers, the children always had great attendance, were well-dressed and well-groomed. Arreola often attended school events.

“How do you understand this?” Bear asked. “There really is no way that you can understand this or why someone would do something like this.”

But on Wednesday morning, in the small two-bedroom house, where the children sometimes slept three to a bed, the middle-class neighborhood woke up to a tragedy in its midst.

Sheriff’s deputies arrived to find the entire family unconscious from carbon monoxide fumes. Dead were Brenda, 10; Jonathan, 7; and Anthony, 2. Cecilia, 4, died later that day. On Thursday, Vanessa, 6, died of her injuries. Kassandra, 9, is expected to make a full recovery.

Garcia, a splicing technician with SBC Pacific Bell in Rosemead, was found unconscious but alive near the grill. Doctors were able to save his life by immediately getting him into a hyperbaric chamber. He is now able to walk and talk, but has not shown any emotion, hospital officials said.

Even as he was wheeled out of a side entrance to the hospital Friday, Garcia had a blank, pale look on his face. While he was taken away in a sheriff’s squad car, at least five family members, including his mother and father, waited in the hospital’s critical care unit.

“We don’t know anything, we don’t know anything,” one family member said as she rushed out of the hospital.

Before being booked, Garcia was to be reexamined in the jail ward at County-USC Medical Center, Bear said. Once at the Men’s Central Jail, Garcia will be under a suicide watch and kept away from other inmates for his own safety.

Bear said investigators have been unable to fully question Garcia or his wife, who has been so shaken that she has been unable to speak to them.

It has been difficult for everybody involved, especially residents of Pico Rivera, where four members of another family were killed less than two years ago.

Richard Flores, 39, and three of his children were stabbed to death in the summer of 2000. Monica Diaz, Flores’ adopted daughter, and her boyfriend, Michael Naranjo, are on trial for the killings.

The Flores home is half a mile from the Garcia residence. For some residents, Wednesday’s events brought back many of the same memories.

“It feels almost the same way it did that night,” said 62-year-old Manuel Iglesias, a close friend of the Flores family, who stopped by the Garcia house this week to light a votive candle on the porch.