Jonathan Rinderknecht “maliciously set” a blaze in the early morning on New Year’s Day 2025 that smoldered and exploded into the deadly Palisades fire that killed 12
The former Pacific Palisades resident who has been held in federal custody since his arrest last October on charges he used a lighter to spark the Lachman fire on a trailhead in Topanga Park, a blaze that smoldered and erupted into the deadly Palisades fire, is now scheduled to go on trial in June, according to court documents.
Jonathan Rinderknecht’s court docket is filled with sealed documents in the months since the 29-year-old was arrested at his sister’s house in Florida. On Friday, the court pushed his trial to June.
If convicted, Rinderknecht would serve between five and 45 years in prison for his connection to the Palisades fire that caused $150 billion in damages. Months before the fire, investigators say, Rinderknecht created an eerie AI image of fire using ChatGPT. On the night he allegedly lit the fire, he was listening to a rap song about setting things ablaze, investigators say.
Jonathan Rinderknecht entered terrifying prompts about rich people and fire into a ChatGPT prompt, federal prosecutors say
Rinderknecht has pleaded not guilty to three federal arson charges: one count of arson affecting property used in interstate commerce, one count of destruction of property by means of fire, and one count of timber set afire, connected to the Lachman fire, which prosecutors say he “maliciously set.”
The blaze smoldered underground for days and became what is known as a “holdover fire,” which then reignited and became the deadly and devastating Palisades fire, ATF and Los Angeles Fire Department officials say.
A major emergency was declared at the Port of Los Angeles on Friday night as 186 firefighters worked to combat a massive and stubborn blaze involving hazardous materials on a cargo ship, authorities said.
An electrical fire was reported below deck of the 1,100-foot container ship 1 Henry Hudson at 6:38 p.m., according to the Los Angeles Fire Department. An explosion rattled the boat just before 8 p.m., affecting power to lights and cranes, authorities said.
Hazardous materials are in several of the cargo containers involved in the blaze and all firefighters are wearing protective suits and oxygen masks, according to LAFD. Specially trained hazardous materials crews are monitoring air quality as efforts continue to suppress the fire in the ship’s sub-levels.
Marine crews are working to cool the outside of the ship to make conditions on the boat more tenable for firefighting crews. As of 8 p.m., incident command had instructed that no firefighting members go below deck.
At that time progress on containment remained slow, according to LAFD. The ship did not appear to be sinking despite a large amount of water being used to fight the fire.
Drones were being used to acquire thermal imaging of the blaze and assist the emergency response, authorities said.
Earlier in the evening, authorities said six of the boat’s crew members were unaccounted for. At 8:30 p.m., LAFD confirmed that all 23 crew members had been found and safely assisted off the ship. No injuries have been reported.
The California Highway Patrol announced at 10:30 p.m. that the Vincent Thomas Bridge, a main access point to the port’s terminals, would be closed until further notice due to the fire. Drivers are advised to avoid the area and follow detour routes.
The U.S. Coast Guard also responded to the incident and established a safety perimeter of one nautical mile around the vessel.
The cargo ship sails under the flag of Panama and arrived in the Port of L.A. on Wednesday after traveling from Tokyo, according to Vessel Finder.
In a statement on X, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said the city is continuing to monitor the incident closely. Gov. Gavin Newsom was briefed on the incident and his office is coordinating with local authorities to support the emergency response, officials said.
Jonathan Rinderknecht will remain in custody on charges he ‘maliciously set’ a New Year’s Day blaze in Topanga State Park than smoldered and erupted into the deadly Palisades fire
Jonathan Rinderknecht, the former Uber driver and Pacific Palisades resident charged with intentionally hiking to a clearing where he sparked a wildfire that later ignited into the deadly blaze that killed twelve, will remain in custody while awaiting trial.
That ruling was issued Tuesday by United States Magistrate Judge Rozella A. Oliver in Los Angeles, federal prosecutors say. Rinderknecht was arrested on Oct. 8 at his sister’s home in Florida by agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms just over ten months after the devastating Palisades fire began to devour nearly 7,000 homes and businesses in the Pacific Palisades and Malibu, fueled by the fierce Santa Ana winds that began to rage on the morning of Jan. 7.
“This means he will remain in federal custody without bond while the criminal case against him is pending. We will have no further comment,” a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney in California’s Central District said in a statement.
Rinderknecht pleaded not guilty at his arraignment late last month in Los Angeles to three federal arson charges: one count of arson affecting property used in interstate commerce, one count of destruction of property by means of fire, and one count of timber set afire, connected to the Lachman fire, which prosecutors say he “maliciously set.”
The blaze smoldered underground for days and became what is known as a “holdover fire,” which then reignited and became the deadly and devastating Palisades fire, ATF and Los Angeles Fire Department officials say.
The Palisades fire destroyed nearly 6,000 homes, leveled hundreds of businesses, and killed twelveCredit: Courtesy of Fire Station 69
If convicted, Rinderknecht would serve between five and 45 years in prison for his connection to the Palisades fire that caused $150 billion in damages. Months before the fire, investigators say, Rinderknecht created an eerie AI image of fire using ChatGPT. On the night he allegedly lit the fire, he was listening to a rap song about setting things ablaze, investigators say.
AI imagery generated by suspected arsonist arrested by federal investigators on Oct. 8 in FloridaCredit: Department of Justice
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Rinderknecht’s family is standing by him. His parents are missionaries in the south of France.
A hiker clambers across a scorched landscape of ash, his footsteps crunching on charred earth as he peers over a ridge at a burn scar pocked with blackened stumps. Below are thickets of green chaparral and densely packed homes.
Suddenly, he stops. He zooms the camera in to wisps of white smoke rising from the dirt.
“It’s still smoldering,” he whispers — apparently to himself. No firefighters or state park rangers are visible.
The video of smoke on a hillside above Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades was shot by a local resident above Skull Rock Trailhead at 11:30 a.m on Jan. 2 — nearly 36 hours after the Lachman fire ignited and long after the Los Angeles Fire Department deemed the fire “fully contained.”
The footage is one piece of a puzzle that has been the subject of so much anger, attention and investigation since the January firestorms: What happened between the time L.A. firefighters declared the Lachman fire out and when it rekindled into a catastrophic firestorm that burned huge swaths of Pacific Palisades?
The video could also be key evidence for attorneys working on behalf of thousands who lost their homes against a player that has so far not received much attention.
Ever since federal officials arrested Jonathan Rinderknecht Oct. 8 on suspicion of igniting the Lachman fire — and revealed that embers from that blaze rekindled into the Jan. 7 Palisades fire — LAFD has faced the brunt of criticism for failing to fully extinguish the New Year’s Day fire.
But lawyers representing thousands of Palisades fire victims are also focusing on another target.
They argue the state, which owns Topanga State Park, where the Palisades fire began, did not do enough to monitor the small Jan 1. Lachman brush fire and stop it reigniting six days later into the devastating Palisades fire that killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,800 structures. Plaintiff attorneys are not alleging the state should have suppressed the fire; instead, they say it failed to make sure the area was secure.
The video, plaintiff attorneys say, corroborates the case they make in a master complaint filed earlier this month: that the state allowed a “dangerous fire condition” to exist on the Lachman burn scar. They allege the state allowed “embers from the Lachman Fire to smolder, rekindle and then re-ignite in dry brush” as the National Weather Service warned of dangerous Santa Ana winds.
California State Parks did not respond to questions on what actions it took to monitor the Lachman burn scar on Topanga State Park in the run-up to the dangerous wind event, or what role it typically plays in monitoring land after fires. It also did not respond to any of the allegations in legal filings or the hiker’s video showing smoke rising.
“California State Parks does not comment on pending litigation,” said a spokesperson for the agency.
Andrew Grinsfelder, 18, waters down the roof of his mother’s home, hoping to prevent the Palisades fire from destroying their house, on Jan. 8.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Government officials typically have limited liability in fires. The legal doctrine of qualified immunity shields public servants from civil litigation, unless their actions violate “clearly established” law, so they can make judgments without constant legal threats and public funds are protected.
California government code specifically prevents public entities and employees from being held “liable for any injury resulting from the failure to provide or maintain sufficient personnel, equipment or other fire protection facilities.”
However, David Levine, a professor of law at UC San Francisco, said allowing a “dangerous condition” on your property offers lawyers a possible path around immunity.
“It’s going to depend on the facts,” Levine said.
It is unclear whether the smoldering depicted in the hiker’s video was on state land. Investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives determined the Lachman fire ignited on a 160-acre sliver of land owned by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority before spreading to Topanga State Park. The video appears to have been shot near the border of the two properties.
Whether or not the smoke in the video was on the state portion of the burn scar, the plaintiff attorneys claim it was clear the Lachman fire was not fully extinguished.
“The rekindle happened on the State Park land and that’s what matters to our case,” said Alexander “Trey” Robertson, an attorney who represents 3,300 Palisades residents and is co-leading litigation on behalf of all victims in the Palisades fire.
Plaintiff attorneys claim California State Parks did not sufficiently monitor the smoldering earth — even as NWS warned repeatedly in the days before Jan. 7 of “critical fire conditions” and a “life-threatening, dangerous” windstorm across parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
Protocol outlined in the state’s Department of Parks and Recreation Operations Manual indicates that staff should monitor burn scars: “Areas of a park unit which have burned will remain closed,” it states, “until appropriate Department staff have inspected the area and rectified any public safety, property or resource protection issues.”
Plaintiff attorneys argue that didn’t happen.
“The State failed to inspect and maintain its property and failed to provide proper fire protection on its property to allow embers from the Lachman Fire on its property,” the complaint states, “particularly in the presence of overgrown and poorly maintained dry chaparral, as well as knowledge of extreme fire weather conditions and predicted Red Flag Warning wind events.”
If a park ranger had inspected the Lachman burn scar and seen the smoke coming out of the ground, Robertson said, they could have urged LAFD to come back out and properly extinguish that fire.
It’s important to note the state has released few details about park rangers’ actions between the Lachman fire and the Palisades fire. It is possible state employees did monitor the burn scar and did not see smoke. California State Parks declined to provide details about ranger movements in the critical days between the two fires.
The area where the Lachman fire burned was not in a remote area, Robertson noted. It is just a couple minutes from a trailhead parking lot in an area popular with hikers.
“A park ranger could have very easily parked his or her truck, and walked a few-minute hike to top of the trail and just done a visual inspection,” Robertson said.
Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star who lost his home in the Palisades fire and has since become an advocate for accountability, said park managers have a duty to keep the public safe.
“It’s so obvious that they left it all smoldering — to the point where multiple hikers have videos of it still smoldering,” Pratt said. “We pay our taxes for it to be maintained. It’s in their policy manuals. It’s the law; it’s their government code: that it can’t create a danger to our town, our houses.”
What happened after the Lachman fire?
When flames lit up the hillside near Skull Rock on the Temescal Ridge Trail shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day, firefighters moved quickly to suppress the blaze.
Within minutes of getting the first 911 call, fire engines rushed to the nearest trailhead and LAFD firefighters hiked to Skull Rock on foot. County firefighters dug a handline to block the spread of the fire with the assistance of LAFD hose lines.
By 4:46 a.m., LAFD announced that firefighters had “completed the hose line around the perimeter of the fire” and it was “fully contained.” “Some resources will be released as the mop up operation continues,” it added, “to ensure no flare ups.”
The next day, when firefighters returned to collect fire hoses, “it appeared to them that the fire was fully extinguished,” according to an affidavit by a special agent with the ATF.
According to the ATF special agent, a firebrand became lodged within dense chaparral and then smoldered and burned within the roots of the vegetation. The underground burning, he stated, was not visible to firefighters or members of the public who visited the burn scar after the Lachman fire.
But that appears to be contradicted by the video taken Jan 2. A local resident shot footage showing smoke and no firefighters on site.
Five days later, the Palisades fire ignited in Topanga State Park about 20 feet south of the perimeter of the Lachman fire.
The legal case
Los Angeles firefighters have been widely criticized for their lack of preparation before the Palisades fire.
After the ATF announced this month that the Palisades fire was a holdover fire ignited by embers of the Lachman fire, Interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva told The Times that LAFD did not use thermal imaging technology to confirm the Lachman fire was out.
But attorneys face steep odds bringing legal claims against LAFD because California governmentcode gives public officials broad immunity against claims of negligent firefighting.
The case against the state, however, is different. Attorneys representing fire victims argue government immunity does not apply to the state’s failure to inspect its land in the days between the Lachman and Palisades fires to ensure that no smoldering embers remained that could reignite as meteorologists warned of dangerous Santa Ana winds.
The complaint cites a 1974 legal decision involving a fire at an airport owned and operated by the city and county of Imperial. The court found governmental immunity should not be used “to allow a public entity to escape responsibility from its failure to provide fire protection on property which it owns and manages itself, particularly where it has permitted a dangerous fire condition to exist on that property.”
After LAFD announced it had extinguished the Lachman fire, the complaint alleges, the state had a “non-delegable duty to inspect its property for dangerous condition given that embers in the root structure are a well-known phenomenon after such a fire, that there was heavy fuel in the form of dry overgrown, chaparral, and a serious known coming wind condition.”
It will be up to courts to determine whether state officials were actually neglectful.
Levine, the law professor not affiliated with the case, said the lawyers who filed the master complaint— a 198-page document that also targets L.A. Department of Water and Power and dozens of public and private entities — had put together an impressively detailed case. But the state could also offer counter evidence and experts might offer different opinions about how often the state would be expected to check the burn scar.
“I think what the plaintiffs are doing is saying, ‘We have a lot of ammunition here,’ and it’s kind of an invitation to consider settling,” Levine said. “It’s a high hurdle, but not an impossible hurdle, and they may have enough evidence to get over that hurdle.”
Even if they prevail, property owners might not actually get that much of a payout, Levine said, because so many of the homes that burned were insured.
“If a fire policy paid out a million dollars, say, on a house up there in Palisades, the insurance company is going to say, ‘We get our money back,’” Levine said. “So how much money would actually end up in the hands of fire victims, I think, would be somewhat open to question.”
The master complaint does not hold the MRCA liable for allowing a dangerous condition on the Lachman burn scar. But even if MRCA isn’t legally liable because the Palisades fire origin point was not on its land, the public agency dedicated to acquiring and preserving open space and parkland also faces questions about its protocol for monitoring burn scars.
The agency has its own fire crew, with 30 full-time, on-call and volunteer wildland firefighters. Its website says it deploys its fire crew on red flag days to prevent and assist in suppressing any fires and coordinates with local fire departments, which are better equipped for larger fire responses.
In a statement to The Times, MRCA said its fire crew “did not play a suppression or monitoring role in the Lachman Fire” and that LAFD “was the lead responding agency and managing authority for the Lachman Fire, working in coordination with the Los Angeles County Fire Department.”
Rainfall and thunderstorms are expected overnight, with the National Weather Service warning of possible flooding in burn scarred areas prompting evacuation warnings
Mayor Karen Bass announced an evacuation warning for the burn-scarred areas of Los Angeles after the National Weather Service forecasted rain and potential thunderstorms through Tuesday.
The NWS also issued a Flood Watch impacting burn scar areas including the Pacific Palisades, Hurst and Sunset burn scars that will go into effect at 10 p.m. Monday night, as peak rainfall is expected to hit its peak Tuesday morning.
“The City is prepared and we are ready to respond during this storm,” Bass said in a statement Monday afternoon.
“The City has bolstered the hillsides and vulnerable areas from potential debris flows in recent burn scar areas – these resources remain in place. Today, we have strategically deployed resources for the Palisades and across the city, including strike teams, rescue teams and helicopters.”
Bass urged caution on the roads and told Angelenos that free sandbags are available to secure properties. The LAPD will be contacting residents at roughly 60 properties that are especially vulnerable to any potential debris flows Monday evening, Bass said.
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In addition, the City’s Emergency Operations Center was activated this morning and the Mayor’s Office of Public Safety is coordinating with the Emergency Management Department, LAFD, LAPD, L.A. County Public Works, the State of California and relevant City Departments to ensure all personnel are ready to respond as needed to keep Angelenos safe.
The arrest of a suspected arsonist did little to assuage the fury of Pacific Palisades residents who continue to grapple with insurance company stonewalling and other issues connected to their devastating losses that came with LAFD missteps
The announcement that an arsonist was responsible for starting a fire a full seven days before her home – and nearly 6000 others – were destroyed in the Pacific Palisades, the coastal neighborhood where Allison Polhill has lived for three decades, did little to bring her any answers about why her house burned.
“It gave me a pit in my stomach,” Polhill told Los Angeles on Wednesday, the day that federal prosecutors announced charges against a 29-year-old former short-term Pacific Palisades resident who “maliciously” set brush ablaze in Topanga State Park in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day. “It didn’t bring peace, it opened a wound because him setting that fire is not an explanation as to why my house burned down.”
Those answers, Polhill and other residents who surrounded City Councilwoman Traci Park at the Palisades Village Green, the eerie hull of a smoke-stained foundation of a Romanesque building that anchored the downtown area behind them a stark reminder of the devastation the community suffered, lie with the city of Los Angeles and missteps, the LAFD has now acknowledged in an After-Action Review Report released hours after the arrest of Jonathan Rinderknecht was announced.
The report details the department’s challenges with staffing and communication — and acknowledges a lack of readiness among the seasoned veterans of the LAFD. The report found that inadequate resources were dedicated to the initial firefight and that evacuation orders were delayed, causing roads to be clogged with abandoned vehicles left behind by fleeing, panicked residents.
Mayor Karen Bass – who was criticized for being on an overseas junket on behalf of former President Biden when the inferno began to rage, leveling 6800 homes in one of L.A.’s toniest zip codes and killing twelve – said the LAFD has begun to implement changes for the department, while highlighting the “relentless heroism of firefighters responding to the blaze.”
Among those changes, Bass says, is “strengthened interagency coordination, upgraded communications technology, enhanced wildfire training and evacuation drills and improved pre-deployment protocols.”
Still, thousands of families are still displaced, like Polhill’s. Park said “It’s a start, but not closure,” adding that the report raises even more questions. The LAFD After Action Report released this afternoon raises more questions.
“I intend to get those answers,” Park said. “I’ll keep fighting for every resident to have a path back home.”
Federal investigators have determined that the wildfire that leveled much of Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7 was a so-called “holdover” from a smaller fire that was set intentionally on New Year’s Day, about a week earlier.
After Los Angeles firefighters suppressed the Jan. 1 fire known as the Lachman fire, it continued to smolder and burn underground, “unbeknownst to anyone,” according to federal officials. They said heavy winds six days later caused the underground fire to surface and spread above ground in what became one of the costliest and most destructive disasters in city history.
The revelations — unveiled in a criminal complaint and attached affidavit Wednesday charging the alleged arsonist, Jonathan Rinderknecht — raise questions about what the Los Angeles Fire Department could have done to prevent the conflagration in the days leading up to the expected windstorm on Jan. 7 and the extraordinary fire risk that would come with it.
“This affidavit puts the responsibility on the fire department,” said Ed Nordskog, former head of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s arson unit. “There needs to be a commission examining why this rekindled fire was allowed to reignite.”
He added: “The arsonist set the first fire, but the Fire Department proactively has a duty to do certain things.”
A Times investigation found that LAFD officials did not pre-deploy any engines to the Palisades ahead of the Jan. 7 fire, despite warnings about extreme weather. In preparing for the winds, the department staffed up only five of more than 40 engines available to supplement the regular firefighting force.
Those engines could have been pre-positioned in the Palisades and elsewhere, as had been done in the past during similar weather.
Kenny Cooper, special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who was involved in the investigation into the Palisades fire’s origin, said the blame for the fire’s re-ignition lies solely with the person who started it.
“That fire burned deep within the ground, in roots and in structure, and remained active for several days,” Cooper said. “No matter how good they are, they can’t see that, right?”
But, he said, wildland firefighters commonly patrol for days or weeks to prevent re-ignitions.
When he worked at a state forestry agency, he said, “we would have a lightning strike, and it would hit a tree, and it would burn for days, sometimes weeks, and then ignite into a forest fire. We would go suppress that, and then every day, for weeks on end, we would patrol those areas to make sure they didn’t reignite,” he said. “If we saw evidence of smoke or heat, then we would provide resources to that. So that, I know that’s a common practice, and it’s just, it’s a very difficult fire burning underground.”
The affidavit provides a window into the firefighting timeline on Jan. 1, when just after midnight, the Lachman fire was ignited near a small clearing near the Temescal Ridge Trail.
12:13 a.m.: An image taken from a UCSD camera, approximately two-tenths of a mile away, shows a bright spot in the upper left — the Lachman fire.
12:20 a.m.: Rinderknecht drives down Palisades Drive, passing fire engines heading up Palisades Drive, responding to the fire.
That night, the LAFD, with help from the Los Angeles County Fire Department, used water drops from aircraft and hose lines, as well as handlines dug by L.A. County crews, to attack the fire, according to the complaint. Firefighters continued suppression efforts during the day on Jan. 1, wetting down areas within the fire perimeter. When the suppression efforts were over, the affidavit said, the fire crews left fire hoses on site, in case they needed to be redeployed.
Jan. 2: LAFD personnel returned to the scene to collect the fire hoses. According to the affidavit, it appeared to them that the fire was fully extinguished.
But investigators determined that during the Lachman fire, a firebrand became seated within the dense vegetation, continuing to smolder and burn within the roots underground. Strong winds brought the embers to the surface, to grow into a deadly conflagration.
LAFD Captain Frank Lima spotted embers flying into the window of a house on Marquez AvenuePhoto: Irvin Rivera
An ongoing federal investigation into the deadly Palisades Fire that killed twelve and devoured miles upon miles of the Pacific Palisades and Malibu has led Mayor Karen Bass to pause the release of an after-action report examining the city’s response.
Per state regulation, the city is required to answer questions about what went wrong – like fire hydrants being tapped dry and why fire apparatus couldn’t access the fast-moving, wind-fueled inferno – as a way to address problems that could be prevented at future fires. But Bass said in a late afternoon press statement that federal prosecutors asked the city “late last week” to hold off on the release of the report.
It’s unclear why Bass released the information, and a request for clarification on her announcement was not immediately answered by her media representatives. Her statement indicated that the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California wants to “avoid interference with the ongoing federal investigation.”
Once that report is complete, Bass said, “the after-action report will be released in coordination with the United States Department of Justice.”
The cause of the destructive blaze remains undetermined more than seven months after an arson investigative task force for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms began to pore through the rubble searching for clues. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office had no comment Tuesday night. A spokesperson for the ATF’s field office in Los Angeles has not returned several requests for comment.
There were a slew of arrests made in the aftermath of the Palisades Fire, among them arsonists and criminals who impersonated firefighters. In late January, Los Angeles reported the arrests of an Oregon couple who were arrested after they drove a fake firetruck emblazoned with the name of a nonexistent fire company into the Palisades.
The driver, Dustin Nehl, is a convicted arsonist. His wife, Jenni Nehl, is a wind and fire expert who volunteered for a program run by the National Weather Service. The couple is expected in a Van Nuys courtroom for a pretrial hearing in early October, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office confirmed.
Jenni Nehl, left, and her husband Dustin Nehl, right, used a fire truck purchased at an auction and emblazoned with the name of a bogus Oregon fire company to sneak into Palisades fire evacuation zone Courtesy of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s DepartmentPhoto: Courtesy of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department
A day after the Nehl’s arrest, the FBI renewed its hunt for a fugitive ecoterrorist, also from Oregon, named Josephine Sunshine Overaker, who was part of a domestic terrorist outfit known as “the Family.” The terrorists were responsible for a slew of arson attacks, including the burning of a ski resort in Vail, Colorado.
The FBI renewed its manhunt for Josephine Sunshine Overaker a day after a convicted arsonist and his wife, a weather and fire educator, were arrested in the Palisade fire evacuation zone dressed as firefighters in a decommissioned fire truck FBIPhoto: FBI
There is a $50,000 reward being offered for information about Overraker. Dustin Nehl told Los Angeles in a phone interview that he did not know anyone in the Family. Nehl also described himself as a “Trump supporter” before asking, “do you know any conservative ecoterrorists?”
Josephine Sunshine Overaker and her compatriots in a ecoterrorism outfit burned down a resort in Vail as part of its activism the FBI says FBIPhoto: FBI
In late April, the ATF conducted a controlled burn along the Temescal Ridge Trail between Skull Rock and Green Peak starting Tuesday, which had been the site of a fire days before the historic winds pushed the Palisades Fire all the way to coastal Malibu. That fire near a hiking trail was ignited on New Year’s Day, sparked by fireworks that may still have been smoldering, officials believe.
The Los Angeles Fire Department has recommended ending a pilot program that sends mental health workers to non-emergency calls, saying it didn’t actually free up first responders and hospital emergency rooms.
The recommendation was made by Peter Hsiao, assistant chief of the Emergency Medical Services Bureau, in a report submitted to the Los Angeles Board of Fire Commissioners at its Tuesday meeting. The board did not discuss the item, which now will be sent to the L.A. City Council for its consideration.
In his report, Hsiao said that the idea behind the therapeutic van pilot — sending a van staffed with a psychiatric response team instead of LAFD paramedics or emergency medical technicians to handle 911 calls involving patients suffering nonviolent mental health crises — was “sound in theory” but not in practice.
He wrote that workers with the county Department of Mental Health “lacked the requisite training and thus were unqualified to perform medical assessments or provide emergency medical services.”
Hsiao said the lack of training offset any benefit to the Fire Department and its resources. Last year, he wrote, fewer than four patients each day met the narrow criteria established for transport by a therapeutic van. He said the mental health agency made several efforts to increase the usage of the van but still fell short.
The pilot program, a partnership between the city and the Department of Mental Health, officially launched in the fall of 2021 and has cost nearly $4 million. The vans operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and are staffed with psychiatric mobile response teams that include a driver experienced in transporting patients to and from health and mental health facilities, a psychiatric technician and a peer support specialist. The vans were placed at five fire stations throughout the city.
The program’s launch, which city and fire officials praised, came amid the public’s frustration over the city and county’s handling of the homelessness crisis, which has been intensifying for years. It also coincided with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to push more people with severe mental health and addiction disorders into court-ordered care that includes medication and housing.
The Department of Mental Health did not respond to a request for comment.
The therapeutic van program already faced issues when the city sought to expand it in 2023. At the time, LAFD raised concerns about the program’s limitations, stating that many of the patients required emergency care and first responders could not transfer them to the therapeutic vans. There was also a staff shortage that prevented some of the vans from operating more than 12 hours.
In his report, Hsiao said the Fire Department was simultaneously operating another program with capabilities similar to the therapeutic van program but with a greater scope of service.
These advanced provider response units, Hsiao wrote, consist of an EMS advanced provider who is either a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant and an LAFD firefighter or paramedic.
The units are capable of treating and assessing voluntary and involuntary mental health patients, including writing so-called 5150 holds to temporarily institutionalize people at risk to themselves or others. The units are also able to provide emergency care and write prescriptions.
“Patients experiencing mental health crises in conjunction with medical, violent or substance abuse issues require a responder with broader capabilities and preferably the ability to transport to non-traditional receiving facilities,” Hsiao wrote in his report. “These functions are largely satisfied by the [advanced provider response units].”
Hsiao said leftover funds allocated for the therapeutic van should go to other programs, such as advanced provider response units.
