Fire Lover Read Free Page A

door that had previously served as the main entrance to a Thrifty Drug Store that formerly occupied a space in the strip mall.
    Luis stayed right there, where there also used to be a Laundromat 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 two 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 five-year-old daughter, Bethany. Matthew William, his two-and-a-half-year-old son, was with his grandparents, and while Matthew Troidl's wife 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 one hundred 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 okay! Maybe. So many of them just kept thinking, maybe.
    The man designated to lead a six-man investigative team the next morning was Sergeant Jack Palmer, a twenty-five-year law-enforcement veteran assigned to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department arson-and-explosives detail. He had investigated nearly five thousand fires in his twelve years as an arson cop, and had the resources of the county of Los Angeles on 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.
    Sergeant 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 the sprinklers that had gone off.
    Skip loaders and bulldozers were already moving debris while the investigators, armed with shovels and wheelbarrows, tried to find the bodies of the four missing victims. Each time a skip loader would snare a load, investigators had to look inside for remnants of charred human beings.
    Sergeant Palmer saw the crane remove twisted steel beams from the center of the building where the roof had collapsed, and 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 this 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 Sergeant Palmer, and he did tell 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 had seen not only smoke in that area, but fire burning in the racks, an amazingly fast fire that chased him and created a draft of its own, blowing him out the door.
    And employee James Cuellar later said that he had been