Others kept searching for Allen. By the time he was pulled from the debris pile, he had been pinned against his knees for eight minutes. He was not breathing and had no pulse.
Allen died the following day.
PHOTO COURTESY OF LAFD
Glenn Allen
PHOTO COURTESY OF NIOSH
Becker's living room as it appeared the day after the fire. Allen was trapped under ceiling debris.
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A few days after that, the house was declared a crime scene. One year later, Becker, an architect who had overseen every detail of the home's construction, was arrested at LAX and charged with manslaughter.
The door to Gerhard Becker's house opens with a satisfying whoosh. As he walks inside, an electronic voice announces that the door is open. The house, which has been repaired since the fire, is on the market with an asking price of $11 million.
As Becker talks, in a thick German accent, he begins to jump up and down. In most houses, he says, the floor is made of wood. When you jump, the floor will bounce. This one does not. The reason? "It's made completely of concrete." The lower levels are also decked in concrete, at a cost of $300,000 per floor.
Becker moves to the sliding glass door to the balcony. On a clear day, the view stretches all the way to Newport Beach. He rolls it open, saying it is made of high-cost, energy-saving glass.
The police investigation pointed to the fireplace as the source of the blaze. Becker, who built the enclosure himself out of wood and combustible drywall, has been accused of cutting corners to save time and money.
The accusation is offensive to him.
"I wanted to do a very stable, a very good house," he says. "It just doesn't make sense to say I was trying to save money on a fireplace, when I am spending money on something nobody sees. Why should I do that if I'm trying to cheat on the code?"
In the late 19th and early 20th century, architects were often prosecuted for building collapses. In 1922, the Knickerbocker Theatre in Washington, D.C., suffered a roof collapse after a heavy snowstorm, killing 98. The architect was indicted on manslaughter charges and later committed suicide. News archives from the era are full of similar cases.
But in modern times, they are exceedingly rare. In part, that is because construction standards are so much higher. In addition, when accidents do happen, it is usually the result of a compounding series of errors, which makes it hard to blame any one person.
In 2008, a crane collapsed in New York, killing seven. A contractor was charged with manslaughter, but he was acquitted after his attorney demonstrated that numerous factors led to the accident. The same year, New York prosecutors charged a building owner with manslaughter after a laborer was crushed in a trench collapse. His attorney argued that the owner did not foresee the danger, and he, too, was acquitted.
If Becker is convicted, he would be the first architect in many years to be found guilty of manslaughter in the U.S. The head legal counsel at the American Institute of Architects could not recall a similar case in the last 20 years.
Becker, 49, grew up in Saarbrücken, Germany, a small city on the border with France. His father was an architect, and he took to the trade at a young age. After studying in Berlin, he joined his father's firm. In his mid-30s, he moved to the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. There, he set up a practice building luxury vacation homes, mostly in the classical Spanish style that his clients preferred.
As a younger man, he had visited Los Angeles, and was impressed by the city's vibrancy, as well as its modern homes. In the back of his mind, he dreamed of someday moving to L.A.
Becker got his chance when his daughter announced that she had been accepted to school in Tucson, where she intended to train to become a professional golfer.
"I wanted to be near to her, as a father, but not too near," he says.
In Mallorca, he had recently begun dating Susanne Kolb, whom he had met in a yoga class. She remembers he seemed completely committed to it. "Oh my God, he must be a yogi," she thought.
"He could put his whole passion into something," Kolb tells the Weekly via Skype from her home in Mallorca. "He realized things that other people are dreaming of ... When I met him, I got spinned around."
Kolb also had children from a previous relationship, and could not move to L.A. because she needed to be near their father. Though she did not see a future for the relationship, she came to stay with Becker as he built his house in the Hollywood Hills.
"He is a perfectionist in everything he is doing," she says. "He has lots of energy, and a brilliant mind."
He spent $1 million to buy a narrow strip of steep hillside on Viewsite Drive. A home had once sat on it, but it had been torn down after sustaining damage in the Northridge earthquake. Becker sized up the property and decided he could sculpt a 12,500-square-foot house on the side of the cliff, at a further cost of $4 million.
