Woman Badly Burned as Home Burglar Bars Thwart Rescue Efforts

An elderly Los Angeles woman was severely burned in her home early Sunday while frantic neighbors, kept out by burglar bars on windows and flames shooting from the door, tried to reach her as she screamed from a bar-covered dining room window.

Fire Department spokesman Jim Williamson and numerous neighbors said burglar bars and flames trapped Alice Chechings, 65. She was hospitalized at Brotman Medical Center in very critical condition with burns over 90% of her body after the 1 a.m. fire at 2112 S. Curson Ave.

Officials said Chechings’ sister, identified as M. L. Johnson, accidentally touched off the fire while attempting to burn newspapers in the fireplace of her modest stucco and tile home. Johnson ran screaming to her front porch, and nearly a dozen neighbors responded, kicking in the front and back doors and spraying the flames with garden hoses.

Unable to Reach Sister

But witnesses said none were able to overcome thick smoke and intense heat to reach Johnson’s terrified sister, who fell to her knees at a dining room window a few feet from the blazing front door. Firefighters arrived at 1:15 a.m., entered through a rear door and pulled Chechings from the blaze, authorities said.

A neighbor who spotted the fire from his car, Chris Lee, 18, said he, his brother and a friend kicked open the front door and attempted to step into the living room, but were forced back by flames.

“If there hadn’t been bars on the windows we would have gotten right through,” Lee said. “She came to the window and she was waving her arms, trying to see through the smoke. She didn’t know where she was, and she was screaming out to us.”

Witnesses said another neighbor, Kenneth Randolph, 26, ran to the front door with a garden hose and attempted to pull away the security bars, which are riveted to metal plates attached to the house.

Couldn’t Remove Bars

“I kept trying but I couldn’t pull the bars off,” said Randolph. “I kept seeing her face, you know, and when she dropped to her knees and stopped talking, I didn’t know what to do.”

Randolph and other neighbors said the bars, which did not have a release mechanism, were to blame for the tragedy.

“For you to see a lady standing right there behind those stupid bars--she on the inside and you on the outside, and nothing you can do--that’s something to behold,” said Randolph. “If it had been pull-away bars, the kind we have on our house next door, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Fire authorities have blamed security bars that lack release mechanisms for the deaths and injuries of several people in recent years, including three children who died in Watts last month after being trapped in their bedroom.

100,000 Units With Bars

City fire officials estimate that about 100,000 homes and apartments in Los Angeles have burglar bars. And, despite a 1985 city ordinance requiring quick-release bars on bedrooms, about half the homes do not have release bars.

For George Gentry, 42, a neighbor who on Sunday afternoon surveyed the tangle of melted appliances and blackened furniture piled in Johnson’s front yard, the city ordinance was of little comfort.

“I heard her hollering and tried to go in,” said Gentry, who was overcome by smoke and forced to turn back. “There were probably 10 people here before the fire trucks, and still we couldn’t help her.”