Luke Ford

Comment: “German-man” convicted of arson (not what you think).

Harry Burkhart was born in Grozny in Chechnya but traveled on German documents, as a German citizen.

Los Angeles Times: The saga of Harry Burkhart, who has been charged in a four-night arson rampage in the city, and his mother, Dorothee, spans continents. Theirs is a tale of massage parlors, small-time con games, neo-Nazi conspiracies, and investigations into mysterious fires set in three countries.

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 later told authorities in an account of the escape. When left alone and uncuffed in a bathroom, Burkhart squeezed through a tiny window and ran to a nearby train station. Once safely away, she called Harry and told him to come with their passports and cash. They drove to Amsterdam and boarded a plane, landing 5,000 miles away in Vancouver, Canada.

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. The fires, investigators say, were a son’s twisted, angry response to seeing his mother captured by federal authorities intent on extraditing her back to Germany.

Indeed, as investigators have begun to unravel the Burkharts’ tightly intertwined lives, they have happened upon a story perhaps more incredible than the fires themselves. It’s a tale of massage parlors, small-time con games, neo-Nazi conspiracies, and investigations into mysterious fires set in three countries…

Connecting with the Mennonite 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. Ingrid Schultz, pastor at First United Mennonite Church in Vancouver, said Harry had a “child-like quality about him” and never seemed happier than when he was in the city’s large Stanley Park “just spending time with the ducks.”

It appears that Dorothee and Harry arrived in Los Angeles in late 2010, after they had exhausted their appeals for immigrant status in Vancouver. It was not their first time in the city. They had come in 2007 shortly before Dorothee was arrested in Germany. During the Burkharts’ visit, police responded to a domestic abuse call and investigated allegations that Harry had tried to attack his mother with scissors. No charges were filed.

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, running a sexual-massage parlor out of her room, according to Los Angeles law enforcement sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was ongoing. A website listing Dorothee Burkhart as administrator says that a woman named “Annabelle” provides “soul-relaxation massage.” The website lists the address the Burkharts shared on Sunset Boulevard.