Shortly before one o'clock in the morning on Friday, January 16, 2009, an emergency operator with the Los Angeles Police Department answered an urgent 911 call from a single-family home on South Redondo Boulevard in the lower Baldwin Hills and Crenshaw community. The caller was a woman in absolute terror. In a panic, she told the dispatcher that an assailant was deliberately setting the house on fire. A moment later, a terrifying scream echoed across the line, and the call abruptly went dead.
Firefighters from the Los Angeles Fire Department and patrol officers rushed to the residence in the 3800 block of South Redondo Boulevard within minutes of the severed call. By the time emergency crews arrived, heavy smoke was billowing into the night air and flames were already violently tearing through the single-story structure. Fire crews launched an aggressive attack on the blaze, working to knock down the flames before the fire could spread to neighboring houses along the quiet residential street.
While firefighters battled the flames, a 63-year-old woman managed to escape the burning structure. She had suffered severe burns and life-threatening injuries while fleeing the inferno. Paramedics rushed her to a local Kaiser Permanente medical center before transferring her in critical but stable condition to the specialized burn center at the University of Southern California. Authorities later confirmed that she was the wife of the homeowner and the mother of one of the victims.
Once firefighters suppressed the fire and navigated the ruined interior, they discovered two charred bodies inside the wreckage. The victims were thirty-four-year-old Cristina Rosales, a Hispanic woman, and her seventy-eight-year-old father, Salvador Rosales. The Los Angeles County coroner's office later noted that Cristina Rosales died of possible smoke inhalation sustained during the blaze, which had been classified as an incendiary act and investigated as a criminal double homicide.
The investigation was assigned to detectives from the LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division's Homicide Special Section in conjunction with arson investigators from the Los Angeles Fire Department. Lead detectives sought to determine who targeted the family residence in the middle of the night and what motivated such extreme violence against an elderly couple and their adult daughter. The brief, frantic words captured during the initial 911 call remained a haunting piece of evidence, pointing clearly to an intentional act of arson by an unidentified perpetrator.
Despite appeals to the public and telephone lines set up for anonymous tips, investigators were unable to publicly identify any suspects or announce an arrest. The year 2009 saw a continuing decline in overall violent crime across Los Angeles, yet crimes involving fatal arson presented unique challenges for forensic investigators whose evidence was heavily consumed by fire. More than a decade and a half later, the arson deaths of Cristina Rosales and her father remain unsolved, leaving detectives seeking any information that could reveal who lit the fatal blaze.
