Firefighter’s Ordeal Hasn’t Ended With Dismissal of His Arson Case

Six grim-faced deputies marched into Los Angeles County Fire Department headquarters on the morning of Feb. 14. Busy working the phone in his cubicle, a public information officer named Roland Sprewell hardly noticed them pass.

A few minutes later, Sprewell’s boss approached, ashen-faced, and summoned him to a conference room. The deputies were waiting. One held a felony arrest warrant bearing the names of Sprewell and his wife:

On or about July 26, 2001 ... Roland Lee Sprewell and Heidi Pauline Sprewell ... did willfully, unlawfully and maliciously set fire to and burn a structure ... at 1541 N. Raymond Ave. in Pasadena.

Sprewell, a firefighter for 18 of his 37 years, was intimate with fire’s capacity to destroy. He was about to learn even more. The way authorities were telling it, the same man who had fielded media inquiries as a county Fire Department spokesman had torched a house after his attempt to purchase it had fallen through.

A judge dismissed the prosecution’s circumstantial case last month before it ever got to trial. But the dismissal is small consolation to Sprewell. The district attorney has threatened to refile the case, leaving Sprewell’s reputation, career and freedom in limbo.

“He’s no longer Roland Sprewell, public information officer. Now he’s Roland Sprewell, the alleged arsonist,” lamented a friend, Brent Burton, a county Fire Department captain.

The story began at 11:45 a.m. last July 26 with a phoned-in report to the Pasadena Fire Department of a fire at Raymond Avenue and Howard Street.

Responding fire crews quickly extinguished a second-floor blaze in a rambling Victorian house. There was no gas or power service in the vacant, unfurnished house, and the fire appeared to have started in the middle of a staircase.

It looked suspicious, but Ray Gordon, the Pasadena Fire Department battalion chief in charge at the scene, had a 1:30 p.m. meeting to attend in East L.A., so he handed control of the scene to Capt. Harry Crusberg and left.

An hour into his meeting, Gordon said, he got a call from Crusberg asking him to return to the scene. Roland Sprewell had shown up, not as a fireman, but as a citizen offering information about his eight-month-long attempt to buy the house.

The house, built in 1916, was owned by a nonprofit housing and neighborhood rehabilitation program, Pasadena Neighborhood Housing Services. The agency had bought the property in 1991, but had put it on the market.

The Sprewells had sold their home in the Inland Empire community of Alta Loma in 1999 and decided to buy in Pasadena, where Heidi had been raised and where Roland had worked for the Fire Department for seven years. He and Heidi, both African Americans, wanted their three children to live somewhere where their race was less likely to invite taunts at school.

The family moved in with relatives in Altadena, and Sprewell looked around Pasadena and Altadena for distressed properties, fixer-uppers; he’d been raised in an Irvine housing tract and wanted “something with character.”

In late 2000, he found the five-bedroom, five-bathroom charmer in northwest Pasadena, the same district he’d worked as a Pasadena firefighter. The area had seen better days but looked to be making a comeback.

Sprewell took Heidi to show her the wood floors, the sweeping porch. They fell in love with the home and settled with the housing agency on a $340,000 sale price with $9,900 down.

But the Sprewells had trouble getting a loan big enough to cover the balance, according to court records. The escrow was extended, but the deal hit another snag--an undisclosed IRS tax lien against the property that blocked completion of the sale.

In June 2001, a frustrated Sprewell asked for a termination of the escrow and a return of his deposit. The housing agency agreed to cancel the escrow but refused to refund the deposit.

The house had stood vacant for nearly six months when the parties met in mid-July last year to try to resolve the problems. At that meeting, Sprewell proposed renting or leasing the property until the sale could be completed. Then he said something that prosecutors would later seize on as evidence of his guilt.

“I told them that, based on my experience as a firefighter in that area, vacant homes were a fire risk,” he said.

The housing service’s executive director declined Sprewell’s offer to rent the property, and the parties agreed to meet again July 26. In the hours before that meeting, much of 1541 N. Raymond would be gutted by fire.

By all accounts, Sprewell showed up at the scene sometime after Gordon had left and started talking, disclosing facts that prosecutors would characterize as suspicious.

“He advised us that he was in escrow ... he was having some problems with the escrow and he was about to lose some [deposit] money,” Crusberg testified at the preliminary hearing. His financial interest in the transaction meant “early on that Sprewell needed to be ruled out” as a suspect, Gordon said.

Because Sprewell had previously worked for the Pasadena department, the investigation was put under the control of Bob Reinhardt, an arson investigator in the Burbank Fire Department.

Reinhardt made an initial determination that the fire had been started intentionally, then turned the investigation over to the San Gabriel Valley Arson and Explosives Task Force.

The task force’s last interview with Sprewell was Aug. 27. According to court records, he recounted his activities on the day of the fire: returning from a trip to Yosemite, seeing a column of smoke in the area of the house while driving his truck to show a prospective buyer, showing up at the housing agency and learning about the fire, driving to the scene.

But the task force wanted more--it asked to interview Heidi and asked the couple to submit to polygraph tests.

Only then, Sprewell said, did he realize that investigators weren’t just gathering information from him. He was a suspect. He told his boss and said he was advised to retain a lawyer, who advised Sprewell against making any further statements.

Three months later, the task force called to ask for another interview, and again the attorney advised against it.

“I think that’s when they got upset,” Sprewell said.

On Feb. 14, one day before he was to take the final portion of the examination for promotion to captain, Sprewell was arrested on a single charge of arson.

Stray details are all he remembers of the day: Being led out of his office in handcuffs, past colleagues too embarrassed to look him in the eye. The unnerving advice he got before being locked in a holding cell with other prisoners--ditch the Fire Department shirt. The jailhouse professional courtesies slipped to him by a sympathetic guard--extra bologna sandwiches and cartons of juice.

Later that day he was transferred to the Twin Towers jail in downtown Los Angeles, issued jail scrubs and waist chains, and placed in a high-security ward.

“I was locked on a bench between two guys discussing the murders they had committed,” he said. “I thought I would never see my family again.”

His wife got a call at work: Roland had been picked up and police were looking for her too. She spent the rest of the day making phone calls, asking an aunt to pick the children up from school, arranging Roland’s bail.

She turned herself in the next morning and bailed out almost immediately.

Her husband’s arrest made national news and led most local broadcasts. Some commentators compared Sprewell with John Leonard Orr, a former Glendale arson investigator now serving a life sentence for setting fires that killed four people and damaged or destroyed 67 homes.

When Heidi Sprewell returned home with the children, she had one request for visitors who wanted to know if the family needed anything: Bring videos “so the kids wouldn’t have to see what was on TV.”

Within a few weeks of the arrests, the housing service changed its mind and returned Sprewell’s deposit. In April, prosecutors would dismiss the arson charge against Heidi Sprewell, in what a spokesperson called “the interest of justice.”

Two months later, at the preliminary hearing, Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Foltz laid out the prosecution’s case against Roland Sprewell. His inability to close the sale of 1541 N. Raymond, Foltz said, had put Sprewell “between a rock and a hard place.” He had “no way of getting out of this deal without losing his money,” Foltz said.

“So he has a strong motive to do it.” Foltz did not explain how Sprewell might have expected burning down the house would lead to a refund of his deposit.

Foltz said Sprewell’s warning statements about the house being a fire risk had been self-serving. And the prosecutor said it could hardly be a coincidence that, on the day of the fire, Sprewell “just happens to be in Pasadena and he just happens to show up at the fire.”

Sprewell’s attorney, Vicki Podberesky, attacked Foltz’s version of events. The house had a history of vandalism, Podberesky said. About a week before the fire, the housing agency had sent someone to board up a crawl space and a second-floor balcony door.

Podberesky noted that firefighters had found the back door to the burning house open. There had been no sign of forced entry, she said, and Sprewell had no key to the property. Podberesky also said during the preliminary hearing that the defense had interviewed two witnesses who had seen suspicious characters near the house on the day of the fire.

One of those witnesses, who spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity, said that, shortly before the fire, she had seen a group of teenagers approaching from the direction of the house. Two of them were passing what looked like a burning piece of rolled up newspaper back and forth, the woman said. “Ten to 15 minutes later, the house was on fire,” the woman said.

After evaluating the evidence, Superior Court Judge Teri Schwartz said it was insufficient to warrant a trial. “The statements [Sprewell] made are consistent with innocence, and so is everything else that the prosecution has presented in this case,” she said.

Prosecutors rarely lose at this stage of a criminal case, experts say. To move a case from preliminary hearing to trial, they must convince a judge only that there is probable cause to believe the defendant guilty. That is a much lower threshold than the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which is necessary to convict a defendant at trial.

“If you can’t meet probable cause, which is really a minimal showing, it may have been an abuse of discretion to file in the first place,” said Gerald Uelmen, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches criminal procedure and evidence courses at Santa Clara University School of Law.

Foltz initially said that he intended to refile the case; now the district attorney’s office will not talk about it, except to say that the case will be reviewed before a decision is made on whether to refile charges.

After four months of paid administrative leave, Sprewell has returned to work, but in a less public role: Although he is still a public information officer, he does not do television interviews as a department spokesman.

He still has a job he loves and says he still respects law enforcement, but Roland Sprewell is a changed man.

His personal possessions now include a thick stack of receipts, collected almost compulsively from his visits to gas stations, restaurants, the corner store. He says the flimsy slips of paper are his insurance in case he needs to prove his whereabouts on a given day at a given hour.

“I have a better understanding of how people get caught up in the criminal justice system,” he said recently. “You’re not innocent until proven guilty. You’re there, and God help you.”