‘We Cannot Reach a Verdict’ — The Palisades Fire Trial Ends in a Hung Jury.

Eighteen months after the Palisades Fire killed 12 people and erased a Los Angeles neighborhood, the only person ever charged with starting it walked out of a federal courtroom on June 26, 2026 with no verdict at all. A jury told U.S. District Judge Anne Hwang it could not agree, and she declared a mistrial.

The split was lopsided in the defendant’s favor: 10 jurors for acquittal, 2 for conviction, on all three federal arson counts against Jonathan Rinderknecht, a 30-year-old former Pacific Palisades resident and Uber driver who now lives in Florida. A jury note put it bluntly — “We have people on both sides that are dead set, unwavering and unwilling to change their opinion.” Rinderknecht has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent.

This page lays out exactly what the jury could not resolve, the evidence the two sides fought over, the settled and brutal toll of the fire, and the wider accountability vacuum around the disaster — the city and state failures that, unlike Rinderknecht, will never see the inside of a criminal courtroom at all. The government says it will retry the case. Every fact below traces to a primary filing or named report.

• 10–2 to acquit — the deadlocked jury's split on all three counts before Judge Anne Hwang declared a mistrial June 26, 2026 · Source: ABC7 Los Angeles; KTLA
• 3 felony counts — destruction of property by fire, arson affecting interstate commerce, and timber set afire — a mandatory five-year minimum and up to 45 years · Source: DOJ (Central District of California)
• 12 dead — killed in the Palisades Fire — the catastrophe Rinderknecht is alleged, but not proven, to have started · Source: Wikipedia; PBS NewsHour
• 6,837 structures — destroyed by the Palisades Fire across 23,448 acres of Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Topanga — the third-most-destructive wildfire in California history · Source: Wikipedia
• $51,700,000,000 — estimated residential property damage from the Palisades Fire alone (Redfin analysis); combined firestorm losses run into the tens of billions more · Source: Wildfire Today
• 0 officials charged — no Los Angeles or California official faces any criminal trial over the drained reservoir, the dry hydrants, or the city's response · Source: ABC7; PBS NewsHour

The collapse came in an unusual sequence. Jurors had deliberated since mid-week, and on Thursday, June 25, they first signaled to the court that they had reached a unanimous decision — then, before any verdict was read, sent a second note saying they were at an impasse, with multiple jurors entrenched on each side. Judge Anne Hwang sent them home and ordered them back Friday to try once more. They could not. After meeting with attorneys and briefly questioning the panel, Hwang ruled there was, in her words, a “manifest necessity to declare a mistrial because the jury is deadlocked.”

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The math, when it surfaced, told a stark story for the prosecution: 10 of the 12 jurors favored acquittal, only 2 conviction. Defense attorney Steve Haney called the count “a pretty resounding indication” of his client’s innocence. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli — the Trump-appointed federal prosecutor who announced the arrest — was unmoved: “The evidence is strong that Jonathan Rinderknecht is responsible for igniting the fire on January 1, 2025, which eventually became the Palisades fire,” he wrote, vowing to “retry this case before a new jury.”

The case is federal, not a Los Angeles County prosecution. A federal grand jury indicted Rinderknecht on October 15, 2025 — eight days after his arrest in Florida — on three counts: destruction of property by means of fire under 18 U.S.C. § 844(f)(1), arson affecting property used in interstate commerce under § 844(i), and setting timber afire under 18 U.S.C. § 1855. Together they carry a mandatory minimum of five years and a statutory maximum of 45. He has been in federal custody since his arrest, denied pretrial release.

Prosecutors alleged that late on New Year’s Eve 2024, Rinderknecht hiked above the Skull Rock trail and, at 12:12 a.m. on January 1, 2025, set fire to dry chaparral — the eight-acre Lachman Fire. According to the government, iPhone geolocation data placed him roughly 30 feet from the origin point, and his digital trail included ChatGPT prompts for dystopian images of a burning city and searches tied to Luigi Mangione. A behavioral analyst testified the alleged motive was “societal revenge.” The defense answered that no accelerant was found, no witness saw the fire start, and the entire theory rested on circumstantial data. None of it persuaded ten of the twelve jurors.

Two pretrial rulings shaped what the deadlocked jury was allowed to weigh, one cutting against each side. Judge Hwang excluded the ChatGPT “burning city” images that prosecutors had splashed across the original complaint — the most viral piece of their case never reached the jury. She also barred the defense from arguing that Los Angeles Fire Department negligence caused or worsened the disaster, which kept the empty reservoir, the dry hydrants, and Mayor Karen Bass (D) entirely outside the courtroom. The jurors decided the case on the holdover-fire science and the geolocation data — and split badly.

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The load-bearing wall of the prosecution was always the six-day gap. ATF investigators contended the Lachman Fire was never fully extinguished — that it smoldered in underground root systems beneath the burn scar until hurricane-force Santa Ana winds on January 7 drove it back above ground as the Palisades Fire. Haney attacked exactly there: even if a jury believed his client lit the New Year’s blaze, he argued, the government could not prove the January 1 fire and the January 7 catastrophe were one and the same. The 10–2 split suggests that doubt landed.

“No matter what the government's theory is, the evidence will show Jonathan did not start the January 1 fire.”

Steve Haney · defense attorney for Jonathan Rinderknecht

Whatever a jury eventually decides about who lit the match, the arithmetic of January 2025 is settled and brutal. The Palisades Fire killed 12 people, destroyed 6,837 structures, and burned 23,448 acres of Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Topanga — the tenth-deadliest and third-most-destructive wildfire in California history. Combined with the Eaton Fire that ignited the same day across the basin in Altadena, the January firestorm killed 31 people and destroyed roughly 16,200 structures, the most destructive fire event in Los Angeles history.

The dollar figure is genuinely contested, and we cite the range rather than pick a side. A Redfin analysis put residential property damage from the Palisades Fire alone at roughly $51,700,000,000. Insured losses across the firestorm have been estimated above $28,000,000,000, the costliest wildfire event in U.S. history, while early AccuWeather estimates of total damage and economic loss for the combined fires ran past $135,000,000,000. Either way, if the government’s theory ever holds, this is among the costliest crimes in American history — and as of June 26, no one has been convicted of it.

The Rinderknecht trial was always going to answer, at most, one question: who started the fire. It was never going to touch the other — why a fire in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in America found the city so catastrophically unprepared. Mayor Karen Bass (D) was in Ghana on a diplomatic trip when the Palisades Fire ignited on January 7, despite National Weather Service warnings of extreme, life-threatening winds issued days in advance. The Santa Ynez Reservoir — 117 million gallons, sitting inside the Palisades itself — had been drained and offline since February 2024 for a cover repair, per the LADWP litigation reported by ABC7, and it sat empty while hydrants across the hills ran dry at the height of the firefight.

What followed the fire was firings and lawsuits rather than answers. Bass fired Fire Chief Kristin Crowley in February 2025; a year later Crowley sued the city and Bass, alleging she was scapegoated for failures above her pay grade. The result is a justice system that, eighteen months on, has put exactly one person on trial for the Palisades Fire — a former Uber driver who insists he didn’t start it — and just watched even that case end without a verdict. The empty reservoir, the dry hydrants, and the mayor abroad remain, in any criminal sense, untouched.

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A mistrial is not an acquittal. Double jeopardy does not bar a retrial when a jury hangs, and Essayli’s office has said it “fully intend[s] to retry this case before a new jury and obtain guilty verdicts on all charged counts.” Prosecutors must now formally notify the court of that intent and set a new trial date; Rinderknecht, presumed innocent, will remain in the case as a defendant. A second jury — if it ever convicts — would weigh the same five-to-45-year exposure.

Watch three things from here. First, whether the government retools its holdover-fire proof, since the six-day smolder is where this case lives or dies and where ten jurors found doubt. Second, whether the defense presses to admit what was excluded the first time. And third, the question no courtroom in this saga has been allowed to reach: whether anyone in Los Angeles or Sacramento government will ever face a forum where the drained reservoir and the dry hydrants are admissible. We will update this page as the retrial is scheduled.

The deadliest wildfire in modern Los Angeles history has, for now, no one convicted of causing it. A jury split 10–2 for acquittal and hung, Judge Anne Hwang declared a mistrial, and Jonathan Rinderknecht — charged but unproven, and presumed innocent — awaits a retrial the government has promised to pursue. The fire’s toll is not in doubt: 12 dead, 6,837 structures gone, tens of billions in damage. The doubt sits entirely on who is answerable for it — the man at the defense table, the officials whose conduct the law kept out of evidence, or, eighteen months later, no one at all.

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Last updated June 26, 2026