Serial arson suspect took twisted path to L.A.
Once Dorothee Burkhart had squeezed through a window and escaped, only two things mattered: finding Harry and getting out of Germany.
It was September 2007 in Frankfurt. Four months earlier, police had arrested Burkhart in a string of thefts and sent her to a woman’s prison to await trial. Separated from Harry, her 19-year-old son who suffered from a slew of mental disabilities, she had grown increasingly anxious. Without her, Harry was alone and unprotected in a city that she believed was filled with people set on hurting them.
So when Burkhart developed chest pains in prison, she didn’t resist being brought to a nearby hospital, she told authorities in an account of the escape. When left alone and uncuffed in a bathroom, Burkhart squeezed through a tiny window. She called Harry, and they drove to Amsterdam and boarded a plane, landing nearly 8,000 kilometres away, in Vancouver.
It was the start of a journey by a mother and her son that came to a calamitous end this week in Los Angeles, when Harry was arrested and charged with setting ablaze dozens of vehicles and a few buildings in a four-night arson rampage that set the city on edge.
Before arriving in Los Angeles, Vancouver police caught up with Burkhart in 2007. While in prison, she would later tell Canadian authorities, she had been tortured while jailed in Amsterdam.
The country’s review board and later an appeals court rejected the Burkharts’ request for refugee status and asylum, concluding there was no evidence to support their claims of persecution and abuse.
During the several years it took for the process to run its course, Dorothee and Harry carved out an existence in Vancouver marked by frequent moves from one apartment to another and claims by Dorothee that Canadian immigration officials were plotting against her and her son. whatever money they had brought from Germany was gone in a few months. They got themselves onto government rolls, according to Lorne Epp, head of a Mennonite organization that operates a well-kept low-income apartment building in which Burkhart and her son occupied two studio units for six months in 2009.
Living in his own apartment, even one that was next door to his mother, seemed too much for Harry. He would place a mattress against the door and sleep on it to keep intruders out, according to court records. A doctor diagnosed him as being on the autism spectrum, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, severe anxiety and a sleep disorder, the records show. The same doctor concluded Dorothee was battling post-traumatic stress as well, along with depression and anxiety.
Connecting with the menno-nite community in Vancouver offered a rare sense of refuge for the pair. Some members of the community even signed a letter urging authorities to grant the Burkharts’ refugee petition.
It appears that Dorothee and Harry arrived in Los Angeles in late 2010, after they had exhausted their appeals for immigrant status in Vancouver.
After the Burkharts arrived in 2010, they disappeared into the large Russian immigrant community in West Hollywood. They rented an apartment for a few months and then moved to side-by-side rooms above a hair salon on Sunset Boulevard, where they lived until their arrests.
Officials believe Dorothee tapped into the city’s illicit sex trade for work.
At some point in 2011, Harry returned to Frankfurt. On Oct. 14, a fire ignited in a house the family owned in the mountains. Investigators quickly determined the fire had been set intentionally and identified Harry as the prime suspect. Authorities in Vancouver now say they are investigating the possibility that Harry was responsible for a series of unsolved arsons there.