Jefferson School Blaze Destroyed Facility 50 Years Ago

By Eric Louie

His business card says he is a member of the Bittermans Club, established June 1, 1959. That's the day 50 years ago that police accused Magid Bateh of setting a fire that destroyed Jefferson School, a neighborhood stalwart at the corner of 19th Avenue and Irving Street.

Only the red brick auditorium survived the inferno and remains a symbol of the Sunset District's past.

A 12-year-old boy at the time, Bateh, now 62, continues to deny setting the blaze which he once admitted to and was sent to a state mental hospital for. When he returned to the neighborhood, he decided to stay.

Today, he passes the long rebuilt school on his motorized wheelchair. He carries a binder with photocopied newspaper clippings, showing a boy making headlines while being interrogated by police for what was then the worst arson in San Francisco school district history. District officials said it may still hold that distinction.

"That was the whole story of my life," Bateh gruffly said.

He wears a faded black, custom-made baseball cap, with lights attached on the front for night travel. Bateh immigrated from Jordan to the United States with his family in 1950, and lived in the Haight Ashbury before moving to the family's Sunset District house. Neighbors were either of Jewish or Irish descent, he said, far from today's high percentage of Chinese Americans. The family ran a grocery store.

Newspaper accounts said the fire was discovered by a nearby gas station attendant who heard an explosion at 5:22 a.m., on Sunday, May 31, 1959. It started in the principal's office, smoldering for hours before becoming a four alarm blaze that injured 21 of the 140 responding firefighters. Flames leapt 30 feet in the air, and left hundreds of students displaced as the school year came to its final weeks.

On June 2, 1959 the San Francisco Chronicle's front page read, in bold capital letters, "BOY ADMITS FIRE."

A man who picked up a boy hitchhiking near the school on Sunday afternoon heard him mumble that he was being blamed for a fire, according to news accounts. He called police after hearing about the incident, telling them where he dropped him off.

Police canvassed the neighborhood, which was where Bateh, who had a history of vandalism, including a fire that previously sent him to a mental hospital, lived. A student in an ungraded class for "retarded" students, he was picked up Monday morning at his temporary school and confessed to police, according to news accounts. His photo ran in multiple newspapers, with one report taking the liberty of calling him "chubby."

According to police, Bateh burned a spelling paper where he had spelled "ran" as "rin," and reenacted the crime, showing where he broke a window to get in.

His principal called him "an unfortunate child under psychiatric care who invents wild and weird stories."

Today, Bateh denies the crime. He said the night of the fire, as his father said to reporters at the time, they were at a relative's house for dinner and didn't come home until about 9:30 p.m. Saturday night. From there, he stayed home.

He believes he was an easy target for the high-profile case given his previous record, a fear his dad had before police picked him up. Bateh claims a threat of deportation got him to confess.

"I was 12-years-old. I was scared," he said. "Next thing you know, I'm telling them I did it."

He also denied the crime back then, in court, but was ordered back to Napa State Hospital. One news account had him breaking into sobs and protesting.

"I won't go back. I won't. They give me shots and I can't stand them," he said.

Bateh said he spent five years at the hospital.

"The conditions were horrible," he said. "You never come out of those places right."

California Department of Mental Health spokeswoman Nancy Kincaid said privacy laws prevented them from saying if Bateh was a patient. She said back then youth were committed at its hospitals, a practice that was largely ended before the last youth patients left a decade ago.

She said new research showed it was better for children to get help within the community.

"It was a much different system," Kincaid said.

One treatment Bateh said he saw others get, electroshock therapy, was once popular for adults, but is mostly long gone from the medical scene.

Children did not get electroshocks back then, Kincaid said. The majority of patients were sent to the institutions voluntarily, sometimes committed by family, as opposed to today when most are there as part of a crime.

"It's hard to fathom," Kincaid said.

San Francisco Police Sgt. Lyn Tomioka said records no longer exist for the case, as it is routine for closed cases of that age.

While it may seem improbable that a burning piece of paper could start such a fire these days, San Francisco school district officials did not know what kind of fire protections were available in 1959, but assume fire alarms would have to have been manually pulled, district spokeswoman Gentle Blythe said.

After getting out of the hospital, Bateh worked numerous jobs, including cleaning Ocean Beach for the City, cutting bushes at the airport and cleaning floors at a machine shop in Hunters Point. But none would last more than five years, and he stopped working in his late 20s.

Bateh has been struggling to make a living ever since. His parents have passed on, but the family still owns their house. He lives with his brother and his brother's wife. He never married or had kids.

For the most part, he has stayed out of trouble. A search of San Francisco court records shows only one entry, a handwritten record in an oversized book covering cases from 1906 to 1969.

While the fire happened long ago, the incident is still vivid in Bateh's mind. He has been in a wheelchair since 2003, after diabetes made his leg inoperable, and he said he still fears harassment from those still around who remember the fire.

"I'm not exactly a celebrity in the Sunset," he said.

After his release, eggs and trash were thrown at his home.

"That's something you live with for a long time," he said.