He Watched Them Describe the Fire: Accused Palisades Arsonist Faces His Alleged Victims as the Trial Opens.

For two days this week, Jonathan Rinderknecht sat at a defense table in a downtown Los Angeles federal courtroom and listened to prospective jurors describe what the Palisades Fire did to them. Some had evacuated. Some knew people who lost homes. One after another, members of the jury pool told Judge Anne Hwangthey could not promise to be fair to the 30-year-old former Uber driver — 29 when he was arrested last October — the government says started it all. Rinderknecht, who has pleaded not guilty, watched them say it.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Federal prosecutors allege Rinderknecht lit a fire in the chaparral above Pacific Palisades in the first minutes of New Year’s Day 2025 — the 8-acre Lachman Fire — and that the blaze smoldered underground in root systems for six days before Santa Ana winds resurrected it on January 7 as the Palisades Fire: 12 people dead, roughly 6,800 structures destroyed, 23,448 acres burned. He faces a mandatory minimum of five years and a statutory maximum of 45 if convicted on all three counts.

A jury of nine women and three men was seated by Tuesday evening. Opening statements begin this morning — June 10, 9 a.m. Pacific — in United States v. Jonathan Rinderknecht, case 2:25-CR-833-AH, Central District of California. He is presumed innocent of every charge, and his lawyer says the government has the wrong man and the wrong fire. What follows is what is charged, what is established, and what Los Angeles still hasn’t answered for.

• 12 dead — in the Palisades Fire alone; 31 across the Palisades and Eaton fires combined · Source: PBS NewsHour, DOJ
• ~6,800 structures — destroyed in the Palisades Fire across 23,448 acres — roughly 16,200 structures counting Eaton · Source: PBS NewsHour, Cal Fire
• 45 years max — statutory exposure on the three federal counts, with a 5-year mandatory minimum on the arson charge · Source: DOJ, U.S. Attorney C.D. Cal.
• $76B–$131B — estimated total damage and economic loss per UCLA Anderson — early estimates ran past $250B (AccuWeather) · Source: UCLA Anderson Forecast, PBS

Jury selection in a case like this has a built-in cruelty: the pool is drawn from the city the fire burned. Over Monday and Tuesday, June 8 and 9, the New York Post reported, prospective jurors who had lived through the Palisades Fire — evacuees, neighbors of the dead, people whose communities are still rubble — stood in front of the man accused of starting it and explained why they could not judge him impartially. “Having that experience and my entire community being impacted, I have doubt,” one said. Another was blunter: she was already biased against him and knew it.

By Tuesday the court had seated a panel of nine women and three men, and Judge Anne Hwang— a Biden appointee confirmed 48–43 on December 2, 2024, and a career federal public defender before taking the bench — set opening statements for 9 a.m. Wednesday, per the U.S. Attorney’s office case page. Rinderknecht has been in federal custody since his arrest in Melbourne, Florida, in early October 2025; he was denied pretrial release and has pleaded not guilty to all three counts.

“I can't come in with a clear head, knowing what I know. I'm already biased against him. I won't be able to set that aside.”

Excused prospective juror · jury selection, June 2026 · via New York Post

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The government’s theory, laid out in the criminal complaint, the October 15, 2025 indictment, and its trial memorandum, goes like this. Late on New Year’s Eve 2024, Rinderknecht — then a Pacific Palisades resident driving for Uber — dropped off his last passenger of the night in the Palisades. Instead of going home, prosecutors allege, he hiked up the Skull Rock trail to a clearing locals call the “Hidden Buddha,” and at 12:12 a.m. on January 1, 2025, set fire to the dry chaparral. That blaze became the Lachman Fire, which burned about eight acres before LAFD crews knocked it down. According to the complaint, iPhone geolocation data placed him roughly 30 feet from the fire’s origin point as it started.

The complaint sketches a state of mind, too — all of it alleged, none of it yet proven to a jury. Passengers he drove that night described him as “angry, intense… ranting about being ‘pissed off at the world,’” according to the government’s filings. His phone allegedly held searches including “free Luigi Mangione,” and prosecutors have separately pointed to social media posts blaming climate change for wildfires, per Fox News and the Washington Examiner. The charges themselves are three: 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.

The hinge of the whole case is what happened in the six days after January 1. Per ATF investigators, the Lachman Fire was never fully extinguished — it allegedly smoldered in underground root systems beneath the burn scar, invisible from the surface, until hurricane-force Santa Ana winds on January 7 drove it back above ground as the Palisades Fire. That “holdover fire” theory is the load-bearing wall of the prosecution, and it is exactly where defense attorney Steve Haney is aiming: his client, he says, did not start the Lachman Fire at all, and even if a jury believed otherwise, the government cannot prove the January 1 fire and the January 7 catastrophe are the same fire.

“The pretrial narrative created by the Government is woefully slanted. Jonathan did not commit the crime he is charged with.”

Steve Haney · defense attorney for Jonathan Rinderknecht

Two pretrial rulings by Judge Hwanghave already reshaped the trial — one cutting against each side. The first gutted the most viral piece of the government’s original complaint: the ChatGPT images. When Rinderknecht was arrested, prosecutors made much of AI-generated images he had allegedly created months before the fire depicting a dystopian burning city — a crowd fleeing flames toward a gate guarded by uniformed figures. Hwang excluded the images from evidence. Whatever they suggested about the inside of a man’s imagination, the jury that decides his fate will never see them.

The second ruling, on May 20, 2026, cut the other way — and it is the one that has victims furious. Hwang barred the defense from arguing that Los Angeles Fire Department negligence caused or worsened the disaster: no evidence, no argument, no witnesses on whether LAFD’s handling of the Lachman burn scar or the city’s January 7 response turned a contained fire into a catastrophe. The practical consequence: Mayor Karen Bass (D)will not testify. The political and institutional failures of January 2025 — the empty reservoir, the dry hydrants, the mayor abroad — are simply outside the walls of this courtroom. For many victims, the only trial the Palisades Fire will ever get is one in which the city’s own conduct is inadmissible.

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Whatever the jury decides about who lit the match, the arithmetic of January 2025 is settled and brutal. The Palisades Fire killed 12 people, destroyed roughly 6,800 structures, and burned 23,448 acres of the Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Topanga, per the year-after accounting compiled by PBS NewsHour. 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. Early estimates ran past $250 billion in total damage and economic loss (AccuWeather’s preliminary figure); the UCLA Anderson Forecast later revised the combined total down to $76 billion to $131 billion. Either number makes the January fires one of the costliest natural disasters in American history — and if the government’s theory holds, one of the costliest crimes.

That is the weight the twelve jurors carry into the courtroom this morning — and the reason seating them took two days of painful colloquy. The fire is not an abstraction in Los Angeles. It is the reason some members of the jury pool no longer have a neighborhood, and the judge’s task was finding twelve citizens of the burned city who could still presume the man at the defense table innocent.

The Rinderknecht trial will answer one question: who started the fire. It will not touch the other one — 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 — a sequence documented in Crowley’s court filings and PBS NewsHour’s year-after accounting. 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 was firings and lawsuits rather than answers. Bass fired Fire Chief Kristin Crowley on February 21, 2025; a year later, in February 2026, Crowley sued the city and Bass, alleging she was scapegoated for failures above her pay grade, per Fortune. More than 3,300 victims have consolidated litigation against the L.A. Department of Water and Power and the city, and an amended complaint reported by ABC7 accuses the utility of altering records after the fire. Plaintiffs’ exposure estimates run from $20 billion past $100 billion — and as of this week, none of it has a trial date. The only person standing trial for the Palisades Fire, eighteen months on, is a former Uber driver who insists he didn’t start it.

“Having that experience and my entire community being impacted, I have doubt.”

Prospective juror and Palisades evacuee · jury selection, June 2026 · via New York Post

Opening statements begin at 9 a.m. Pacific today. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli (R)’s office will present the geolocation data, the witness accounts, and the ATF’s holdover-fire analysis; Haney will attack the ignition evidence and, above all, the six-day gap between the Lachman Fire and the Palisades Fire. If the jury convicts on all counts, Rinderknecht faces five years at minimum and up to 45; if the holdover-fire link fails, the deadliest fire in Los Angeles history goes back to having no legally established cause.

Watch three things as the trial unfolds. First, how the government proves the underground six-day smolder — expect dueling fire-science experts, because the entire case lives or dies there. Second, whether the defense can put reasonable doubt on the 12:12 a.m. ignition itself, with no eyewitness to the lighting. Third, what happens outside this courtroom: the Crowley suit, the 3,300-plaintiff LADWP litigation, and the question of whether anyone in Los Angeles government will ever face a forum where the empty reservoir and the dry hydrants are admissible. We will update this page as the verdict comes in.

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