Man fascinated with fire imagery arrested in Palisades blaze, officials say
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
By SHAWN HUBLER and JILL COWAN
Federal authorities in Los Angeles said earlier this week 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 6,837 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 toward 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 8 acres before Los Angeles firefighters declared that it had been contained several hours later. On Jan. 7, however, a gathering windstorm reignited buried embers that had continued to smolder 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 U.S. 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 Wednesday in Orlando, Florida, but no decision was made about his detention, so he was set to return Thursday.
His lawyer in Florida, Aziza Hawthorne, an assistant federal defender, did not respond to requests 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 36 square miles, leveling some of the most expensive and storied 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,” Gov. 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 Tuesday’s arrest was one of at least a half-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.
Hours after the announcement of the arrest, the Los Angeles Fire Department released an internal review that called the Palisades fire a “perfect storm” that had been fueled by hurricane-force winds and tinder-dry conditions and exacerbated by “staffing gaps due to budget constraints, overtime fatigue, and approved absences.”
The city’s report echoed the county’s earlier review of the Eaton fire, a separate blaze that also exploded on Jan. 7, saying that the response had also been complicated by shortages of water and communications breakdowns. It did not specify the cause other than to say that it was the subject of a federal investigation and that the Palisades fire had erupted “below the burn scar” of the previous New Year’s Day fire.
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 Jan. 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.
After the Palisades fire, speculation focused almost immediately on the possibility that the Jan. 1 fire, known as the Lachman fire, had been rekindled. Most residents theorized that the original source had been fireworks on New Year’s Eve.
Instead, federal investigators determined that the Jan. 1 fire had 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 toward “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.”
Cellphone data showed that he took two videos of the scene at 11:47 p.m. 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.