A member of the Rothschild banking dynasty is believed to have been killed in a house fire in Los Angeles, KABC-TV has reported.
A blaze at a property on Lookout Mountain Avenue in the Hollywood Hills broke out on Wednesday, with 45 firefighters requiring just over half-an-hour to extinguish the flames, it said.
The body of a man was later discovered inside the burnt house, according to KABC-TV, which is ABC’s flagship broadcaster on the West Coast.
The authorities have not announced the victim’s name yet. However, neighbors who spoke to journalists identified him as Will Rothschild of the wealthy Rothschild family.
They described Rothschild to KABC-TV as “an eccentric millionaire – or even billionaire – with multiple properties and dozens of expensive cars.”
However, they said he had lived as a recluse on Hollywood Hills in a small house in conditions typical of a hoarder.
The cause of the fire is currently being investigated. It is not yet clear whether the elderly man died before or as a result of the blaze. There were no other fatalities of injuries in the incident.
“Given the fire damage, it is kind of hard to determine how much of that was prior to the fire and how much of it is,” the Los Angeles Fire Department’s battalion commander, Adam Knabe, told KABC-TV.
Locals said they were saddened by the news of the man’s death, with one of them saying that Rothschild was “a good guy, a good neighbor.”
The Rothschild family emerged from the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt in the 19th century to become one of the world’s richest and most powerful financial dynasties, bankrolling wars and helping to shape Europe’s and America’s economic and political history.
In February, Lord Jacob Rothschild, a financier and British peer, died aged 87. Lord Rothschild’s family has an estimated fortune of around £825 million (over $1 billion), according to the 2023 Sunday Times Rich List.
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