Residents watch over neighborhoods where fires have occurred

Peter Farrant spent New Year’s Eve sitting by his corner window, his ears attuned to the sounds of the street.

His watch was from 11 p.m. to midnight. His wife’s turn was next, from midnight to 1 a.m. the next morning, in an improvised neighborhood vigil among about half a dozen residents of North Kings Road and 1st Street in the Beverly Grove area. At 3 a.m., two young women were scheduled to take a walk around the block.

The night before, the neighborhood awoke to find a black BMW engulfed in flames in the driveway of Farrant’s building, a blaze suspected to be the work of what authorities say is a serial arsonist or arsonists. Neighbors had frantically tried to flag down passing fire engines to no avail. They later learned that the trucks had been en route to another car that was ablaze three blocks away.

PHOTOS: Arson fires

In areas affected by the rash of fires, a deep sense of unease settled in Sunday as residents feared that they could be the next target in the seemingly random attacks.

“You sleep with one eye open,” said Farrant, a contractor who has lived in the neighborhood for 17 years. “Until someone gets caught, I guess.”

Longtime West Hollywood resident Cathy Cole spotted firefighters leaving the scene of a suspected arson on Sweetzer Avenue on Sunday morning. She stopped her bicycle and said: “There’s no logic to any of this, is there?”

Cole said that in her nearly two decades living in the city, she had felt that West Hollywood was isolated from the violence and danger of surrounding areas. But on Sunday, she pointed to building after building on tree-lined Sweetzer Avenue and asked, “Why this one versus that one versus that one?”

“It’s bizarre, so surreal and random,” said Cole, a stockbroker who is originally from New York. “Time to move back to New York, I guess.”

MAP: Arson fires

Jason Adam felt as though the fires were closing in on him. Thursday night, there was a fire two blocks east and three blocks north of his building. The next night, it was two streets west. Saturday night, it was north on Sweetzer.

A panicked neighbor who heard about the fire on Sweetzer called Adam on Saturday night and asked: “Is it our building?”

“Some people are really freaked out about it,” he said.

Over the weekend, Adam began parking his car on the street, instead of in the carport behind his building — the type of target favored by the suspected arsonist or arsonists. Some neighbors followed suit. A friend who was going to leave her dog with a neighbor while she left town changed her mind when she realized that the neighbor’s apartment was above a carport, Adam said.

A similar mood prevailed Sunday in North Hollywood as unnerved residents struggled to make sense of nearby fires.

The destruction began just before 1:40 a.m. Saturday when a Lexus parked at an apartment complex on Riverside Drive went up in flames.

“I’m just trying to understand the mind-set of a man who does something like that,” said a 33-year-old resident who declined to identify himself, fearing that the suspected arsonist might retaliate. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

Just minutes after that fire started, a BMW a few blocks north went up in flames. And then a carport on Burbank Boulevard, a few blocks further north, and just across the street from a police station, began burning.

“I just can’t make sense of it,” said Jeff Duncan, 45, a resident of the Burbank Boulevard complex. “I don’t know why somebody would do something like that.”

Amanda Hanniford, 34, who lives next to the carport that burned in that complex, said she slept downstairs Saturday night, fearing that she might have had to run out of her home again. Even the fireworks that rang in the new year were upsetting, she said. As county arson investigators examined the scene Sunday afternoon, Hanniford wondered what might happen next.

“The first night was West Hollywood; then they came here; then they went back to West Hollywood,” she said. “So, are they going to come back over the hill? It’s scary.”

On Cleon Avenue near Bob Hope Airport, where a car parked in front of a single-family home burned early Saturday morning, neighbors said they were trying to be vigilant.

Manny Figueras said he went to nearby homes the day of the fire and asked neighbors to keep an eye out for one another and for any suspicious activity. Then he sent text messages to everyone he knows in the North Hollywood area, telling them about the blaze and asking them to do the same.

“It’s just terrible,” he said. “Whoever is doing this doesn’t have the right mind-set.”

Jose Arias, who lives next to the affected house, said he was worried about the safety of his home but was unsure of how to protect it.

“I’d like to have a way to protect us,” he said. “But who am I protecting us from?”

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