Witness to Fire Says Men Didn’t Try to Save Children : Tragedy: Adults fled as three youngsters died. Drug agents are searching site for clues to cause of blaze.

AGUANGA, Calif. — While drug agents sifted through the blackened and melted metal of a mobile home, Art Burnstad remained haunted by the sight of adults fleeing for their lives--and leaving three young children for the flames.

The children’s mother was screaming and “six or eight men were running away from the fire, and none of those guys were trying to get the kids out,” Burnstad, who was first on the scene with his wife, said Wednesday. “When we went up to help, one of the guys yelled, ‘Get out of here! We can take care of this ourselves.’ ”

Instead, all of the adult occupants of the hillside home--including the children’s mother--sped off, some scattered to the wind, others to local hospitals, leaving the home fully engulfed in fire Tuesday afternoon.

It was not until hours later that the bodies of three children were recovered, too burned to recognize. The Riverside County coroner’s office tentatively identified them as the children of Kathy James, who was critically burned by the fire: Dion, 3, Jackson, 2, and Megan, 1.

Authorities said the inferno may have started when a pressurized brew of toxic and volatile chemicals for making methamphetamine erupted in flames.

There was no question in Burnstad’s mind about what was going on, given the round-the-clock activity at the place, nestled in the rolling, brush-covered hills east of Temecula.

“It was a catastrophe,” Burnstad said, his voice trailing off. “Those people were more interested in drugs than anything else.”

Three adults were hospitalized for burns suffered in the fire, and could face criminal charges after investigators piece together what may have been going on inside the home, said Mark Lohman, an investigator with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.

James, 39, was in critical condition in the burn unit at San Bernardino County Medical Center, a spokesman there said. Harry Jensen, 42, also was being treated there and was in stable condition. A second man, Michael Talbert, 38, was treated for burns and released from a nearby hospital.

None of the three has been arrested because the investigation is in its earliest stages, Lohman said. He said investigators were questioning James’ oldest child, age 10, who apparently was pulled from the fire by his mother and taken to a family in the area. The boy was cooperating with the investigation, Lohman said.

Some of the other adults who were seen fleeing from the scene were later identified and questioned by investigators “and they are making statements that corroborate our suspicion, that there was methamphetamine manufacturing going on at the time,” Lohman said.

The site was cordoned off as a homicide scene Wednesday. Narcotics officers, wearing plastic gloves and booties, retrieved signature accouterments of a meth kitchen--pressure cookers, a vacuum pump, containers of various chemicals and white gas for cooking. Binding agents commonly used to cement the white powdery drug into tablets were found buried in a nearby shed, Lohman said.

Possession of those items is not illegal, and no actual drugs were found at the scene, he said.

Ed Synicky, special agent in charge of the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement office in Riverside said that while the fire destroyed much of the possible evidence of a lab, “we can certainly say there were things there consistent with a lab.”

The scene reflected a classic and reoccurring theme of drug makers more concerned about earning a buck and getting high on cheap but potent “speed” than the safety of innocents who lived there, Lohman said.

“And these kids,” he said, “were the most innocent of victims.”

Synicky said the presence of children at drug labs is a scene narcotics agents encounter all too often.

Of the 200 or so clandestine methamphetamine labs busted in Riverside County this year by state, county and local law enforcement, children were present at about one in five, Synicky said.

“These people are focused on manufacturing drugs for their personal use and profit, and safety--whether for their own lives, their children or their neighbors--is a secondary concern of theirs,” he said.

Methamphetamine, considered a bargain substitute for cocaine because it is cheaper to make and has longer-lasting effects, has become the greatest bane of narcotics officers in recent years as its use has skyrocketed after being popularized by outlaw bikers in the 1970s.

Most of the methamphetamine traded in California today is made in bulk by Mexican drug families who oversee teams of cookers who are dispatched to remote locations throughout the state. They confound law enforcement by making large batches of meth, literally overnight, before dismantling their labs.

The challenge in tracking down the meth makers is made even more difficult because methamphetamine’s ingredients can be purchased legally and concocted into the drug by following relatively simple--but dangerous--recipes.

Smaller, mom-and-pop meth kitchens also exist, generally to make the drug for the operators’ own use or sale to acquaintances. Some are so brazen that they simply rent a motel room to make a night’s worth of the drugs, while others operate meth kitchens in agricultural sheds, mobile homes and other locations far from public view.

That may have been the case in Aguanga, investigators said. The site of the fire was 15 miles east of Temecula, off a two-lane winding highway, up two dirt roads and a long dirt driveway.

Burnstad and his wife rent a storage shed about 100 yards from the mobile home. They said they have been keeping their eyes on the place ever since a group of adults moved into it in August.

Virtually every time he went to his shed to feed the dogs he keeps there, he said, vehicles would head up the driveway to the mobile home, seemingly at all hours.

It was no mystery to him, Burnstad said, what was going on--especially when the occupants would hoist a blanket to block his view of their home.

Even law enforcement knew the remote location was a ripe hideaway for illegal drug manufacturing. On Dec. 8, narcotics officers arrested the occupant of a different mobile home about 100 yards away for possession of methamphetamine, Lohman said.

On Tuesday afternoon, Burnstad said, he and his wife had been at the shed for only a few minutes when they saw the mobile home erupt into a caldron of coal-black smoke.

Six to eight adult men and two or three women ran outside, he said. “One of the women was screaming that her kids were inside. The men were just running around and then they all drove off,” Burnstad said.

One of the women looked burned on her legs and was covered by dirt, as if she extinguished flames by rolling on the ground, he said.

With everyone else running away, Burnstad said he ran to a neighbor to call for help.

Burnstad said he last saw the children last week, when he gave them a bag of Christmas candy. One of the youngsters took the bag and literally pulled it up the dirt driveway to the mobile home, he recalled.