Uber Driver Charged in Connection With Starting the Palisades Fire

Nine months after the Palisades Fire ignited, killing 12 and destroying more than 6,800 structures, authorities announced that they’ve arrested and charged 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht in connection to starting the deadly blaze.

Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said Rinderknecht was arrested Tuesday in Florida. He has been charged with destruction of property by means of fire, which is a felony that carries a minimum sentence of five years in federal prison.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has been investigating since January and has determined that it was a reignition of an earlier fire. Officials said at a news conference Wednesday that Rinderknecht started that fire six days earlier while working as an Uber driver — around midnight on Jan. 1 — after dropping off a passenger.

The 8-acre Lachman Fire didn’t spread far as L.A. city and county helicopters made water drops and hand crews cut a fire line, helping to contain the blaze before moving on to mop up. Firefighters then patrolled the burned area to extinguish smoldering stumps, logs and piles of ash, as there was a risk of reignition later.

That’s exactly what appears to have happened.

According to Essayli, the fire smoldered underground until strong winds on Jan. 7 caused the fire to surface and spread, becoming one of the most destructive fires on record.

Speculation about the case of the fire had centered on fireworks, but Essayli said that authorities have no evidence that’s the case. Rinderknecht reportedly lived in the Pacific Palisades, but had relocated to Florida since then.

Authorities gave no potential motive. They projected AI images, said to have been generated by the suspect, at a news conference.

In a statement, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass thanked federal and local investigators for the work that led to the arrest.

“Each day that families are displaced is a day too long,” Bass said, “and as we are working tirelessly to bring Angelenos home, we are also working towards closure and towards justice — and today is a step forward in that process.”

The backstory

The Palisades Fire sparked about 10:30 a.m. on Jan. 7, amid a massive windstorm in Southern California. By the time it was fully contained 24 days later, the fire had burned more than 23,000 acres and destroyed more than 6,800 structures and damaging 937 more. Twelve people were killed.

An LAist review of after-action reports released following the January fires and the 2018 Woolsey Fire — which killed three people and destroyed nearly 2,000 structures across L.A. and Ventura counties — found similar shortfalls in L.A. County’s emergency response. The reports offer similar recommendations for how to fix the issues too.

The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department told LAist it isn’t “reasonable or appropriate” to compare the reports, a sentiment echoed by the county Fire Department, which said in a statement that “hurricane-force winds that caused a never-before-seen ember cast and house-to-house ignition, the idea that recommendations in the Woolsey After-Action Report are strikingly similar to those in the Eaton/Palisades wildfires, we disagree.”

After the announcement of the arrest in the Palisades Fire, Bass said the Los Angeles Fire Department’s after-action report would be released soon.