L.A. celebrates Griffith Park's recovery a year after fire

Los Angeles County prosecutors have refused to identify the man they detained soon after the fire broke out in the early afternoon of May 8, 2007, in Aberdeen Canyon, northeast of the Roosevelt Golf Course and near the Greek Theatre.

Prosecutors said they expect to decide whether to file criminal charges within weeks.

Described as a man in 20s who lives out of state, the suspect was questioned and eventually cited on suspicion of smoking in a restricted area. But no criminal charges have been filed in the case, which officials say remains under investigation.

Part of what prosecutors must sort out is whether the alleged actions were intentional, criminally reckless or an accident.

"We have reviewed hundreds of pages of evidence and conducted numerous interviews, follow-up interviews, forensic examination of computer evidence and consulted local as well as national experts," said Deputy Dist. Atty. Jean Daly.

For a time, the blaze threatened the park's historic merry-go-round, and led to the evacuations of the Griffith Park Observatory and Los Angeles Zoo, which prepared but never executed plans to remove animals from the area.

About 300 people were ordered out of neighborhoods southeast of the park, and evacuations eventually extended down to Los Feliz Boulevard.

No residents or firefighters were injured in the blaze, although there was a close call when half a dozen firefighters were trapped under a footbridge by a wall of flame that erupted near the Aberdeen trial.

The suspect was treated at the Grossman Burn Center for serious burns but has since recovered.

The 4,200-acre Griffith Park is one of the largest municipal parks in the United States. The land was bequeathed as a Christmas gift to Los Angeles in 1896 by Col. Griffith Jenkins Griffith, who made a fortune as a gold speculator.

The fire that swept through the park last year was the worst there in at least three decades and one in a string of blazes that broke out in the Hollywood Hills during the driest year on record.

City officials marked the year anniversary of the fire by lauding the efforts of firefighters and praising residents for their brush-clearance efforts.

Sol Shankman, 92, has been going to Griffith Park for 70 years but said he hadn't seen devastation on the scale of last year's fire in decades. Returning for a news conference Thursday, he said, the park has bounced back nicely.

"We had such good rains that the park would have come back to a considerable degree," Shankman said. "I didn't walk on my customary trials for about a year. One of the side trails I took was very steep, so I was very eager to return to the old, worn-out trails I was used to."

andrew.blankstein@latimes.com