A residential neighbourhood on fire in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles, on January 7. Los Angeles authorities have made an arrest in the fire that devastated Pacific Palisades in January, killing 12 people and destroying 6837 structures. Photo / Philip Cheung, The New York Times
Federal authorities in Los Angeles said today that they had arrested a 29-year-old man who appeared to be obsessed with fire in connection with the wildfire that devastated the wealthy coastal enclave of Pacific Palisades in January.
Officials said the man, Jonathan Rinderknecht of Melbourne, Florida, had intentionally set a fire on New Year’s Day on a hiking trail in the Santa Monica Mountains.
That small blaze rekindled disastrously a week later into the Palisades fire, killing 12 people and destroying 6837 structures, most of them homes.
In a federal complaint, prosecutors alleged that Rinderknecht, an Uber driver and a former resident of the Palisades, dropped off a passenger on New Year’s Eve and drove towards a popular trailhead known as Skull Rock.
He then parked, tried to call a former friend and walked up the trail, taking videos with an iPhone and listening on YouTube to a French rap video featuring a character setting things on fire.
Then, federal authorities alleged, he set a fire with an open flame and called 911 to report it but did not initially get through because he could not get cell service.
As firefighters rushed to the scene, prosecutors said, he used his phone to take videos of the response.
The ensuing brush fire consumed 3.2ha before Los Angeles firefighters declared that it had been contained several hours later.
On January 7, however, a gathering windstorm reignited buried embers that had continued to smoulder unbeknown to fire crews who had intermittently scoured the area for hot spots for two days.
“A single person’s recklessness caused one of the worst fires Los Angeles has ever seen,” Bill Essayli, the acting US Attorney in Los Angeles, said in a statement.
Rinderknecht is in custody and was charged with destruction of property by means of fire, Essayli said.
Rinderknecht made his first appearance in court today in Orlando, Florida, but no decision was made about his detention, so he was set to return tomorrow.
His lawyer in Florida, Aziza Hawthorne, an assistant federal defender, could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Palisades fire was among the most destructive in California history, a wind-driven catastrophe that was one of at least six major fires that swept Southern California in early January.
The flames from the Palisades alone consumed more than 93sqkm, levelling some of the most expensive and famous real estate in California, including parts of Topanga Canyon and Malibu.
“This tragedy will never be forgotten — lives were lost, families torn apart and entire communities forever changed — and there must be accountability,” Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement.
The arrest, he said, “marks an important step toward uncovering how the horrific Palisades fire began and bringing closure to the thousands of Californians whose lives were upended”.
The 10-month federal investigation that led to yesterday’s arrest was one of at least half a dozen that local, state and federal authorities began after the disaster.
The first published review, a 133-page report commissioned by Los Angeles County, was released late last month, and the first phase of another, ordered by Newsom, is expected to be released soon.
The possibility that the Palisades fire might have been rooted in an earlier wildfire had been among the leading theories for months, as investigators studied the blackened hills where it started, interviewing witnesses and combing through footage and data from surveillance cameras.
In an affidavit filed with the federal complaint against Rinderknecht, investigators said that while the firefighters quickly suppressed the January 1 fire and returned the next day to make sure it was extinguished, pieces of burning wood had become buried during the firefight and were still hidden within the root structure of dense vegetation.
Rogue embers are a common wildfire threat, and firefighters take special care to douse them, frequently using thermal imaging or keeping crews on site long after a fire is contained to find and extinguish hot spots.
An investigation found, for instance, that the 2023 fire that killed 100 people in Maui stemmed from the remnants of a brush fire that firefighters believed they had put out.
“Wildfires need to be 100% mopped up — that’s fire-service parlance for digging out every root, going down to bare mineral soil and cutting a wide, secure perimeter around the burn,” said Patrick Butler, a former assistant chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department who is now the fire chief in nearby Redondo Beach.
“I’ve investigated several large wildfires — many over 500 acres — that smouldered for weeks and later flared up again.”
After the Palisades fire, speculation focused almost immediately on the possibility that the January 1 fire, known as the Lachman fire, had been rekindled. Most residents theorised that the original source had been fireworks on New Year’s Eve.
Instead, federal investigators determined that the January 1 fire unfolded after Rinderknecht — the only person in the trail area at the time, according to cellphone and camera data — had hiked to a nearby clearing known as “Hidden Buddha”.
Officials said he was playing Un Zder, Un The, a rap video by French artist Josman that he listened to at least three times in the previous four days.
According to the complaint, Rinderknecht knew the area well, having once lived roughly a block from the trailhead. He also knew the clearing, investigators added, so named because of a wooden utility pole remnant where passing hikers sometimes placed small Buddha figurines.
He had been fixated on fire for months, prosecutors said.
Six months before, he had prompted ChatGPT on his phone to produce a “dystopian” painting of a burning forest and victims fleeing towards “hundreds of thousands of people in poverty” who were “trying to get past a gigantic gate with a big dollar sign on it”, the federal complaint read, quoting the ChatGPT prompt.
“On the other side of the gate and the entire wall is a conglomerate of the richest people,” the prompt added. “They are chilling, watching the world burn.”
A month later, the complaint said, he confided to a relative that he had burned a Bible. Afterwards, it said, he wrote to his ChatGPT app that it felt “amazing”.
“I felt so liberated,” he wrote, according to the complaint.
Uber passengers he had driven on New Year’s Eve told investigators that their driver had been agitated and angry, the complaint said.
In a statement, Uber said that while Rinderknecht was not on the app when the fire broke out, the company provided federal investigators with GPS information and other data about his whereabouts around the time that the fire started.
He passed an initial background check in 2023 in addition to yearly updates, in accordance with state law. Rinderknecht is no longer driving for Uber and his account has been banned, the company said.
Cellphone data showed that he took two videos of the scene at 11.47pm and called up the French rap video seven minutes later, the complaint said.
Eighteen minutes later, video footage from two environmental research stations captured smoke rising from the area and the glow of the flames.
As the fire spread, investigators said, his cellphone data showed him fleeing downhill, trying repeatedly to call 911. By the time he was connected, the hills were ablaze.
On the line with a dispatcher, they said, he typed a question into a ChatGPT app on his iPhone, asking if a person would be at fault if they were smoking a cigarette and a fire erupted. “Yes,” ChatGPT replied.
Los Angeles firefighters fought the Lachman fire for most of the night, dropping water from the air and scrambling through brush in the dark to scrape fire lines.
They reported shortly before 5am on New Year’s Day that they had set up a “hose line” around the perimeter and would start releasing crews “as the mop up operation continues to ensure no flare ups”.
There were no injuries or damaged structures in that fire, the Los Angeles Fire Department said.
Terry Fahn, a Palisades resident who lost his home, said that he would be relieved to see justice done if someone started the fire on purpose.
But the arrest did not assuage his fury over what he said were failures by elected leaders and state and local fire officials to prepare for and respond to the blaze that eventually became the Palisades fire.
Experts have raised questions about whether the Los Angeles Fire Department had adequately prepared for extreme fire conditions that meteorologists had warned for days were coming, and many survivors have sued, charging negligence on the part of emergency responders.
Fahn rattled off a litany of concerns that community members raised in the aftermath of the fire: brush in the area was overgrown, and firefighters did not truly put out the earlier fire or adequately monitor the area afterward, even as strong winds kicked up.
Firefighters later did not have adequate water to douse flames because of delayed repairs to a reservoir.
“I’m angry that an individual would be so depraved,” Fahn said. “It doesn’t take away from my sense of frustration and anger with Government.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Shawn Hubler and Jill Cowan
Photographs by: Philip Cheung
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