Animator Fireevents affecting all animators

I have an object that has 2 rigs and 2 animators. 1 animators controls the body and 1 animator controls the equipment. The root object contains the main animator and the different rigs are children of the root object. Only one child rig has an animator. Both animators use the same animation controller and I wrote a script to synchronize the animator calls to them.
The problem I have is that I want to deactivate the animation events for the animator on the child rig. I tried setting the fireevents property of the child animator to false, but it seems to have disabled firing events all together.

Should this property affect all animators on the object or just the instance that I am referencing?

 

Actually, I was wrong. It was an unexpected behavior (at least to me) on GetComponentsInChildren. I expected GetComponentsInChildren to return the components in only the child objects, not also the root object. I was unexpectedly setting fireevents to false on the main animator.