I'd never heard of this horrific incident, at the time it was considered the worst mass murder in the city's history....
Excerpts from here.....
https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the...ce_burned.html
"At 20 minutes to midnight, four men who had been thrown out of the Club Mecca, 5841 S. Normandie Ave., came back with an old five-gallon paint can full of gasoline. One of them, an ex-convict, threw the gas into the bar like a cleaning lady pouring out her mop bucket; another, a delivery driver for a bindery, lit a matchbook and tossed it onto the gas-soaked carpet. The small neighborhood bar, packed with 21 people, exploded in flames.
Firefighters found one victim still sitting on a bar stool, so badly burned it was days before he was positively identified. Four other men and one woman died, and the rest survived, one of them with severe burns. At the time, police called it the biggest mass murder in Los Angeles history.
Detectives found one of the killers, Clyde Bates, 36, and his companion, Oscar Brenhaug, 44, sleeping off a drunk in a blue Plymouth sedan parked in the driveway of Bates’ home at 1623 S. Menlo Ave. Investigators eventually arrested the other two men, Manuel Joseph Hernandez, 18, and Manuel Joseph Chavez, 25.
Claiming that he was too drunk to have helped plan the bombing, Brenhaug turned state’s evidence and the case against him was dismissed for lack of evidence. Hernandez was sentenced to life in prison and vanished from the pages of The Times a few years later.
Bates and Chavez were sentenced to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin, and in 1960, they got into a Death Row brawl with Red Light Bandit Caryl Chessman and convicted killer James Merkouris over watching the Rose Bowl on TV. But in 1966, Gov. Pat Brown commuted their sentences, giving Chavez life in prison and Bates life without the possibility of parole.
In 1972, the state Supreme Court scrapped the death penalty, further reducing Bates' sentence to life in prison. A final Times story says Bates was scheduled to be paroled in March 1977. Chavez had already been freed and was working in Sacramento as a counselor for ex-offenders."
L-R: Manuel Hernandez, Manuel Chavez, Oscar Brenhaug and Clyde Bates.
Apparently the place was reopened....