Man accused of starting deadly Palisades fire faces retrial in Los Angeles

A man accused of starting the deadly Palisades fire in Los Angeles is being retried this week. His first trial ended four months ago with a hung jury.

Federal prosecutors say Jonathan Rinderknecht, 30, a former Uber driver, is responsible for the January 2025 wildfire, which killed 12 people and ravaged thousands of buildings in the Pacific Palisades.

Prosecutors say that on 31 December Rinderknecht dropped a passenger off in the upscale Los Angeles enclave before climbing on foot to a hillside clearing. Law enforcement officials said he ignited a brush fire there, which ballooned into the 8-acre Lachman fire.

Firefighters extinguished the Lachman blaze on 2 January, but its embers smouldered underground for days before erupting into the devastating Palisades fire, prosecutors say.

Rinderknecht has pleaded not guilty to charges of destruction of property by means of fire, arson affecting property used in interstate commerce and timber set afire.

During the trial, prosecutors portrayed Rinderknecht as a lonely and angry person lashing out over grievances including failed romances and a general disdain for the rich. Months before the Palisades fire, he asked ChatGPT to create a dystopian image of a city burning down as an apathetic wealthy class watched on. 'He lit that fire to take back power,' prosecutor Danbee C Kim reportedly said during closing arguments.

Looming over the case was the question of the Los Angeles fire department's culpability. Jurors were not allowed to hear evidence related to the department's handling of the Lachman fire, yet they appeared reluctant to place square blame on Rinderknecht. Two jurors voted to convict, while 10 voted not guilty.

One juror who voted not guilty told reporters he was not saying there was not enough evidence that Rinderknecht started the first fire. But if he did, the juror asked, why should he be responsible for the whole Palisades when others had done things incorrectly through negligence.

Federal prosecutors have asked the court to explicitly instruct the retrial's jurors not to consider the adequacy of the Lachman fire suppression efforts in Rinderknecht's case. A judge tentatively granted the request, court documents show.

Meanwhile, Rinderknecht's defence team unsuccessfully tried to block the retrial jury from hearing descriptions of the AI-generated apocalyptic images he created with ChatGPT. In a recent court filing, his lawyers wrote that the images are not his statements but output a program produced, that they are poor evidence of what he intended, and that a picture of a burning landscape carries obvious emotional force in a case about the Palisades fire.

The case has been closely watched as victims of the Palisades fire continue to pursue damages from the city. Jury selection is set to begin on Monday at a courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.