A Florida man has been arrested in connection with the Palisades Fire, which tore through Los Angeles in January.
The more than 23,000-acre blaze on January 7 killed 12 people and destroyed nearly 6,900 structures.
Jonathan Rinderknecht, 29, is facing a federal charge of destruction of property by means of fire, a federal complaint filed today says.
Rinderknecht was working as an Uber driver and lived in Pacific Palisades, a wealthy coastal suburb, at the time of the fire.
Prosecutors allege that he dropped off a passenger on New Year’s Eve before walking up Skull Rock, a popular hiking trail in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Rinderknecht tried to phone a friend and listened to a French rap video on YouTube featuring a person lighting things on fire, prosecutors said.
He then set a fire using an open flame and dialled 911 to report it, only to have no phone service.
A fire was reported shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day that charred eight acres near the Skull Rock trailhead in the Palisades Highlands.
The flames, called the Lachman fire, had been contained, city fire department alerts show.
Rinderknecht allegedly lied to police during an interview, claiming he was near the bottom of the trail.
He also earlier used ChatGPT to create at least nine artificially generated images of a ‘burning city’, Bill Essayli, the acting US attorney for Southern California, said in a post on X.
Investigators suspect that the Palisades fire was a ‘holdover’ fire, meaning it erupted from the remnants of the earlier blaze.
‘Unbeknownst to anyone, the fire continued to smoulder and burn underground, within the root structure of dense vegetation,’ the complaint said of the Lachman fire.
The embers of the brush fire were whipped up by a growing windstorm
Officials still list the cause of the Palisades fire as ‘under investigation’.
Rinderknecht will appear in court this afternoon local time.
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