Man Loses Job, Then Arson Puts Him Out of Home

Last week turned out to be a difficult one for Robert Bates.

On Thursday the 45-year-old military retiree lost his job at downtown Los Angeles’ Mercantile Center.

And on Saturday he returned from a brief trip to the market and found “a whole lot of commotion” at the Hayward Hotel, on 6th Street between Broadway and Spring Street, where he had rented a room for five years. He rushed up the stairs toward his eighth floor room but was turned back.

“I went up to about the sixth floor and the smoke was so heavy that I came back down into the lobby,” he said.

He ran outside, looked up and saw smoke pouring out of the windows--his windows. In his absence, fire investigators said, someone entered his room and set it ablaze. Bates was left with only the shirt, pants and brown knit cap he had donned for his trip to the market.

But Bates seem undaunted. He has some friends he can stay with until hard times blow over, he said.