A 30-year-old man accused of starting the deadly Palisades fire is being retried for arson this week, four months after his first trial ended with a hung jury.
Federal prosecutors say Jonathan Rinderknecht, a former Uber driver, is responsible for the January 2025 wildfire, which killed 12 people and ravaged thousands of buildings in the Pacific Palisades.
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, which ballooned into the 8-acre Lachman fire.
Firefighters extinguished the Lachman blaze on 2 January, but its embers smoldered underground for days before erupting into the devastating Palisades fire.
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 at the world over grievances including failed romances and a general disdain for the rich.
Months before the Palisades fire, Rinderknecht 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 tacitly over the case, though, was the question of the Los Angeles fire department’s culpability. Although jurors were not allowed to hear any evidence related to the department’s handling of the Lachman fire, they appeared reluctant to place square blame on Rinderknecht.
Two jurors voted to convict Rinderknecht, while 10 voted not guilty.
“I’m not saying I don’t think there was enough evidence to say he started the first fire,” one juror who voted not guilty told reporters. “But say he did? I don’t see why everybody else’s negligence of doing things incorrectly, where he needs to be responsible for the whole Palisades.”
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 defense team unsuccessfully tried to block the jury in the retrial from hearing descriptions of the AI-generated apocalyptic images he created with ChatGPT.
“The images are not Mr. Rinderknecht’s statements. They are output a program produced in response to his instructions, over a series of attempts, and the prompts themselves show that the program did not produce what he asked for. What the images depict is therefore poor evidence of what he intended, while a picture of a burning landscape shown to a jury in a case about the Palisades Fire carries obvious emotional force,” his lawyers wrote in a recent court filing.
Rinderknecht’s case has been closely watched as victims of the Palisades fire continue to pursue damages from the city.
Jury selection is set to begin Monday at a courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.
