A 29-year-old California man has been arrested in Florida and charged with intentionally setting one of the most destructive urban fires in US history earlier this year.
Jonathan Rinderknecht, then an Uber driver, is accused of setting a fire just after midnight on January 1 on a hiking trail in the Pacific Palisades, the Los Angeles Times reports.
That fire was dubbed the Lachman fire, and firefighters initially fought it down, according to KTLA. But it smoldered underground for a week before erupting into the Palisades fire, which ultimately killed 12 people and destroyed nearly 7,000 structures in the Palisades and Malibu.
After the fire, Rinderknecht, the son of Baptist missionaries, moved to Florida, where he was arrested in Melbourne this week and charged with one count of destruction of property by means of fire in federal court.
At a news conference on Wednesday, prosecutors said that they traced digital and behavioral clues leading to their suspect’s arrest, after initially interviewing him on January 24.
Sensors detected the initial fire shortly after midnight on January 1. Prosecutors say Rinderknecht tried multiple times to call 911 but couldn’t make a connection because of poor reception. When he finally reached dispatchers, he said he was was reporting the fire from the bottom of the trail, but investigators later learned that he was just 30 feet from the fire’s origin point when he made that call.
A criminal complaint says the Rinderknecht had been driving for Uber on New Year’s Eve and dropped a passenger in a residential area of Pacific Palisades just before midnight. Two of his pasengers that night told investigators he seemed “agitated and angry.”
Uber told KTLA it “worked closely” with investigators to track Rinderknecht’s locations that night and removed his access to the Uber app once they knew of his suspected involvement in the fire.
Officials said after dropping his last passenger than night, he parked near the Skull Rock Trailhead, and unsuccessfully tried to call a friend. Then he hiked up the hill.
“He then used his iPhone to take videos at a nearby hilltop area and listened to a rap song – to which he had listened repeatedly in previous days – whose music video included things being lit on fire,” the Department of Justice said in a statement.
The song was “Un Zder, Un Thé,” by the French artist Josman.
“I have reviewed an English translation of the French lyrics for the song, and a theme of the song is despair and bitterness,” the complaint says.
After the fire began, the complaint says, Rinderknecht drove away from the scene but turned around after passing fire engines heading to battle the fire. He followed and filmed the firefighters battling the blaze.
Further, the complaint says, Rinderknecht used ChatGPT to create an image for him showing “a dystopian painting showing a burning forest and a crowd fleeing from it.” That rendering came months before the fire he is accused of setting.
Rinderknecht faces five to 20 years in prison if convicted.
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[Featured image: FILE – The devastation from the Palisades Fire is seen in an aerial view in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, Monday, Jan. 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File). Inset: Jonathan Rinderknecht/US Department of Justice]