Los Angeles police have launched a formal homicide investigation after determining that a huge wildfire that has killed two firefighters in the hills above the city was intentionally set.
LA County sheriff’s officials started the investigation - which could lead to first degree murder charges - yesterday, five days after the two men died when their fire truck plunged 800ft down a steep mountain road.
The blaze began 10 days ago and has burnt almost 150,000 acres (60,000 hectares) of the Angeles National Forest, making it the most destructive brush fire in the city’s history. It is gradually being brought under control.
Officials said that forensic evidence from the origin of the blaze on the Angeles Crest Highway indicated that the fire was an act of arson.
LA County Sheriff Lee Baca refused to release details of the evidence but a source close to the investigation suggested incendiary material had been found.
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“If an arsonist did this, everyone should be angry about it,” Sheriff Baca told the Los Angeles Times newspaper. “This is one of the most unacceptable crimes.”
The city’s deputy fire chief, Mike Bryant, said that he was glad investigators were making progress, but “it doesn’t mend my broken heart”.
“Those were two great men that died,” he said. “We’ve got to put this fire out so no one else gets hurt.”
The two dead firefiighters, Captain Tedmund Hall and Specialist Arnaldo Quinones, were supervising a fire crew made up most of prison inmates at a forest campsite. They died on Sunday on Mount Gleason while trying to find an escape route for the crew after flames overran the camp.
Even in a landscape blackened by wildfire, clues abound for investigators following the path of a blaze and trying to find out how it started. Investigators start at the place where firefighters were first called and work backwards.
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But the LA Times said that investigation of the current blaze, which has been dubbed the Station Fire, had been complicated by the fact that the fire passed over the point of origin twice.
Jeff Tunnell, a wildfire investigator for the Bureau of Land Management, said that even in charred terrain, investigators can detect important signs in the soot.
“Fire creates evidence as well as destroys it,” said Mr Tunnell, a veteran of 50 wildfires. “We can follow fire progression back to the point at which it started.”
The clues can come from burnt trees and grasses, where the amount of burnt foliage can show the direction and speed a fire was moving. Investigators search for the remains of whatever started the fire: a charred match or cigarette butt, a piece of metal from a car or part of a power cable.
If no such object is found, they often conclude that a fire was “hot set,” meaning it was started by a person holding a lighter to the brush.
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“That’s what you are going to assume, because there’s no other competent ignition source,” Mr Tunnell said.
Most wildfires are caused by human activity, even if indirectly. Others may be caused by lightning or volcanoes.
At the time the current fire broke out, Forest Service officials, said there was no lightning and no power lines nearby.
Three years ago, arson investigators probing the cause of a wildfire in the San Jacinto Mountains that killed five firefighters discovered evidence of different types of incendiary devices at several fires.
They recovered everything from simple paper matches to more elaborate devices made up of wooden matches grouped around a cigarette and secured with duct tape or a rubber band.
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The evidence was enough to build a first-degree murder case against mechanic Raymond Lee Oyler. In March, the evidence was used to convict him and send him to death row.