Meet the LA fire looters
At least, here are some that have been arrested so far. I bet they didn’t expect to be caught, considering the way California usually treats thieves, and considering the chaos of the situation. Still, they might just get a mild wrist slap.
I found the first word in this sentence from the article rather odd:
Remarkably, none of those arrested were actually living in the evacuation zone and seemingly travelled with the intention of taking advantage of the devastation.
“Remarkably”? I don’t find it the least bit surprising or remarkable. Did the author expect them to have been from toney Pacific Palisades?
When disasters occur, there are always human locusts to take advantage. I have read elsewhere that in the case of these fires the criminals are looting the intact houses whose residents have been evacuated, and therefore the homes are empty but the belongings are all there and ripe for the taking. This particular sweep didn’t just result in arrests for theft, because most were not caught in the act:
Officers arrested Kaliel Love, who was on probation, in an alley behind the 600 block of the San Vicente Boulevard after he tried to evade police by running away.
Dominic Pacheco Magana, 18, and Miguel Angel Dorantes, 22, are also accused of conspiring to burgle homes after they were pulled over driving a van displaying stolen registration stickers.
Officers scoured the vehicle and found black Nike nylon gloves, a black ski mask and three large freight tote bags and black t-shirts.
Pacheco’s phone had the Watch Duty app open. The app monitors fire and evacuation zones.
‘Based on the items located inside the vehicle, the location of the vehicle stop, the ski mask, and the attempt to conceal their identity and avoid detection by removing the license plate, officers arrested the duo for being in the mandatory evacuation area with the specific intent to commit residential burglaries,’ police said.
Santa Monica Police said two people were also arrested for being in possession of concealed handguns.
The rest of the detainees were arrested for violations including drug possession, driving violations, outstanding warrants, parole and probation violations.
They also caught some arsonists – although not in Pacific Palisades – possibly inspired with a contagion effect:
Two people have also been arrested for lighting fires, including Ruben Montes, 29, who was detained for arson on Sunday in Irwindale, roughly 16 miles away from Altadena, where the deadly Eaton Fire continues to rage.
Mexican national Juan Manuel Sierra-Leyva, was also taken into custody after allegedly being caught on video walking with a yellow blowtorch before he was confronted by residents in Calabasas, west of Beverly Hills.
I will add here that I know some people in Pacific Palisades whose house burned down. I knew them when they were just starting out and had nothing. They’ve lived there for close to fifty years, and are now old and ill. Harrowing.
My sister’s bro-in-law lives in Altadena. He evacuated his son and his dogs to my sister’s house in Pasadena then went back and was able to save his house overall, but there’s a lot of smoke damage and his yard is completely burned out. He’s “behind a checkpoint” so my sister and her husband can meet him there to pass him food, water, and supplies but they can’t go in to his house, nor can he leave lest he not be allowed back. Today she noted that even the checkpoints are shut down, though, and she doesn’t know why.
My entire adult life, whenever there’s been rioting in the Bay Area, a great deal of it is from people who travel to it. And we’ve seen this with Antifa, too, that a lot of those people are not living in the cities they are destroying.
So, what are going to do with the looters they catch? More than what they’ve been doing with the arsonists they’ve caught starting these fires?
several years ago, there was a pretty big bush fire in Australia. Got a lot of attention as a prop for climate change, although the 75-6 fire season burned ten times the area.
As I recall, they caught twelve arsonists. That brings up a question; what’s in the mind of an arsonist burning something he doesn’t have insured? Just to see things burn? Another item was that a multiple of that number were fires stared by morons burning trash outdoors on hot, dry, windy days when they’d been told not to. Along with other items, I suppose, like grilling, possibly.
Although a couple of years ago, Greece caught seventy-nine arsonists which, given it’s Greece, amounted to maybe a couple of dozen trees apiece.
And some caught lighting the great Canadian fire(s) a couple of years ago and a good number sought.
Even if you’re not an arsonist, what does it take to figure out NOT to burn on a risky day? Has natural selection stopped, or reversed?
No Anglo names among those arrested. Well maybe “Kaliel Love” is.
But all others, by their names, are Latinos.
While my daughter was here for Christmas, her Baltimore home was, literally, smashed into and robbed before cops, alerted by the security system, got there. Their voices were recorded by the system.
Their Mexican housekeeper listened to the recording and could not understand their Spanish, said they were not Mexicanos. Maybe from Honduras.
So all thanks to Open Border Biden.
what’s in the mind of an arsonist burning something he doesn’t have insured? Just to see things burn?
–Richard Aubrey
Pyromania. It’s a thing.
______________________________
Pyromania is an impulse control disorder in which individuals repeatedly fail to resist impulses to deliberately start fires, to relieve some tension or for instant gratification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyromania
______________________________
A man’s got to control his impulses.
No Anglo names among those arrested. Well maybe “Kaliel Love” is.
Betcha dollars to donuts Kaliel Love is black.
In the Hare Psychopathy Checklist fire-setting is named as an indicator of psychopathic tendencies.
Irish: You are so right. It is Joshua Kaliel Love, and almost all perps were “minorities”, black or brown. Should have checked Neo’s link before reacting. My bad.
All will be released.
When disasters occur, a remarkable future deterrence can be achieved by televising the hanging of human locusts from lampposts.
In the upcoming musical comedy Palisades Fire, a gang of looters will loot, sing & dance to the consternation of Governor Hair Gel and his team of lesbian fire marshals. A major theme of the comedy will be that the latter know nothing about fire, but everything about DEI&B.
See also Daniel Greenfield: How the LAFD Came to be Run by Three Lesbians Named ‘Kirsten’
Hilarious, but no joke.
My younger brother started setting fires in 3rd grade. It seems he had an unhappy home life.
Banned Lizard:
There is something weirdly humorous about the situation.
I keep trying to work it into “Meet the new looters, same as the old looters” à la The Who.
Or a sitcom modeled on “Meet the Parents” with Robert De Niro and its sequel “Meet the Fockers.”
Somebody out to be going to prison for this ! The Department of Defense update from Monday, 13 Jan, says that their 10 Navy Active Duty helicopters with water buckets have still not been assigned a job by the State of California!
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4027855/national-guard-fights-california-wildfires-additional-assets-remain-on-standby/
Devastating story about your friends, Neo. So many people left with nothing.
I would not be at all surprised to learn these out-of-town looters are organized South American or Central American criminal gangs. Burglary rings of this type are being reported around the country. One gang has been targeting, for instance, wealthy NFL and NBA players while they’re at games.
Neo,
My heart aches for your friends.
They say losing your house to fire is almost as devastating a crisis as losing a spouse. It doesn’t seem as if it should be that way as it is ‘only’ a material thing, but it is. If your friends have children they brought them up in that house. That is so much history, real and spiritual, to lose.
When my sister’s neighborhood was under a ‘warning’ I started to game out what we would do if the worst happened and it was just overwhelming. Her best friend in a ‘safe’ area of LA could take her in temporarily. I have room for her in my Hawaii home long term but not all her clients can be handled remotely. There must be thousands of people who will have to find housing that is a realistic distance from their work. I doubt that amount of available housing exists.
Families with children have to find a new school.
How many people will be able to rebuild? Even if rebuilding is financially possible, finding temporary housing for the next 5 years is going to be extremely difficult. The effects of this disaster will take a decade and more to work through. For some people – like your friends – there won’t be time to recreate their home.
Molly Brown:
Yes. I try to figure out what all the LA folks displaced by the Fires are going to do.
They won’t exactly be Okies escaping the Dust Bowl, but it will be hard.
It appears that many of the pro environmentalists are also anti-new housing oriented. But a city needs property tax revenue if it is going to have revenue to squander on DEI etc. No houses equal reduced tax income, so even stupid city (and state ) officials should have an incentive to relax or repeal onerous regulations, etc.
I don’t know what fraction of the “tax base” has gone up in smoke, but if LAFD was down $17M already and Bass was seeking to drop another $50M, something has to give. I don’t know if it is a good or a bad thing in this case (probably both), but sometimes vacant property is worth more than one with a (not so desireable) dwelling or business on it already. $3K worth of debris removal and you have a $300K property to sell?
Huxley, I’m very sorry about your younger brother, and your home life.
Chaos in homes do such damage to the children.
How much younger?
Re: my comment at 12:41 am.
(– thought of this past the edit window.)
I wish I had written “Chaos or neglect or other abuse”
There is precedent for shooting looters, pour encourager les autres.
@ Scott — or, in this case, to discourage any others.
Now, shooting the governor, mayor and the LAFD Board might encourage better behavior from their successors, but it’s California, so even that is doubtful.
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2025/01/14/what-the-heck-gavin-newsom-does-shimmy-dance-and-grins-at-reporters-as-he-address-catastrophic-wildfires-n2184359
https://redstate.com/wardclark/2025/01/14/outrageous-before-la-burned-lafd-was-begging-for-money-to-replace-broken-down-equipment-n2184349
Let’s have a few more stories about the CA fires, because elections have consequences.
https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2025/01/13/breaking-arson-investigators-converge-at-site-of-palisades-fire-ignition-n2184308
Totally unpreventable. Yep.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2025/01/15/reporter-drops-a-bombshell-about-the-firefighter-response-to-the-los-angeles-county-fire-n2650556
From his description of the complexities involved, I suspect it didn’t.
Two-for-one, to give different expression of the same fiasco.
https://redstate.com/mike_miller/2025/01/14/insane-ca-eco-bureaucrats-shut-down-palisades-wildfire-prevention-project-in-2019-to-save-a-shrub-n2184316
https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2025/01/14/newsom-saved-the-shrubs-instead-of-protecting-the-humans-in-the-la-fire-n4935979
In other words, the city was stopped from doing all the things that people now complain they didn’t do, because they were “damaging” a protected shrub.
In fact, they were trying to protect the animals, trees, and shrubs.
And humans, but environmentalists really don’t care about them.
Somewhere recently I read a complaint that it wouldn’t be “fair” for Trump (he isn’t even in charge yet!) to put conditions on the aid that California will certainly receive.
I think that the Environmentalists ought to pay at least part of the damages.
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/413237.php
“Some Republicans Balk at Writing California a Blank Check for Fire Relief, Seeking to Condition That Relief on Policy Changes”
Ace is on a roll that summarizes a lot of the insanity that Californians now want everyone else to pick up the bill for.
He is not amused.
Plus a few observations on the looting of the Hollywood celebrities’ homes, which suddenly isn’t “mostly peaceful protests” and informal reparations.
“A picture is worth a thousand words” in these days translates to “a meme says more than an essay.”
In re “cars are going to destroy the earth because climate change!!”
https://accordingtohoyt.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/1724329026434916352.jpg?w=1024
Priorities matter.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/gg8hm9fxwaa2zby.jpg?w=588
In re the CA politicians blaming everyone but themselves.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/bafkreihm4mtlyxmvzjlkxfi7xrbrrfe2lfqzzo6f4kw3hcmusif6jhfpva.png?w=400
Which is a meme of a meme.
https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/who-created-the-classic-this-is-fine-meme-and-how-did-it-become-so-popular-the-history-behind-the-iconic-webcomic-explained
I get pyromania. Those unfortunates are lighting fires all the time.
This is different. The perps wait, months and, for all they know, years, for Just The Right Time. Dry conditions, insane winds in the proper direction…..
I’m put in mind of the dramatic fulfillment of using a very small bit of energy to unleash incomprehensible amounts of energy which, dramatically, is waiting.
First “Guns of Navarone” movie had our heroes going through intrigue, action, secrecy, combat, all in order to set off a smallish charge in the magazines of the huge German guns covering the Strait of Navarone. Result on film was a volcanic-level explosion far past anything we’ve seen the IAF manage in the last couple of years. Drama was little to HUGE.
If I recall “Return to Navrone [who’d want to live in Navrone] it was the same kind of lead-in to use a smallish charge to blow a dam. Incomprensible amounts of energy held back and…released by our heroes with a small charge. Great photography, and possibly somewhat slowed motion to exacerbate the visual effect. In each case, massive drama, audience appeal to ordinary moviegoers.
So I don’t see this kind of thing as being the garden variety pyromania. Something else.
Wait for the right time to destroy. would any of these folks blow a dam for the same reason(s), whatever they are, if it could be done as easily?
So maybe it’s an urge to destroy hugely without having to prepare hugely. Pretty cheap, as a matter of fact. If you wait. Do firebugs wait?
You know that when somebody is described as a “Mexican national” what they really mean is “illegal alien.” If the individual was a green card holder, he’d be described as a “Los Angeles man” or something like that.
Anyway, the looting that’s going on is an unfortunate aspect of human nature. I remember after PSA 182 crashed in San Diego back in 1978 there were reports of looters taking jewelry from the crash victims.
If large wildfires are considered “absolute proof” of “climate change”, then why would you think the arsonists behind these fires are “organic” rather than being bought and paid for by those pushing the climate change agenda? Just as with racism, when the demand for “catastrophic climate events” outweighs the supply, why not create them yourselves (see Michael Crichton’s banned novel on this subject)?
(The points might not necessarily be mutually exclusive–if you can recruit pyromaniacs to serve as your arsonists, you might not have to pay them that much, or at all–all it might take is assurances that your legal teams will get them off if they are caught.)
@smelting:see Michael Crichton’s banned novel on this subject
“Banned” novels are not usually available for purchase in multiple formats.
@ smelting & Niketas > Okay – – you got me interested.
I have not read Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear” (sold on Amazon, as Niketas linked), so I am presenting these reviews only to suggest that smelting may have been using “banned” as short-hand for “dismissed as a science-denier-supporting book saying mean things about global warming.”
(The lone positive reviewer, Bauer, notes that AGW was not yet called climate change. The reason global warning lost favor tends to bolster Crichton’s side: it was demonstrably not happening.)
That would certainly be enough to get the author cancelled if he hadn’t died in 2008.
This is not an exhaustively researched topic, but a cherry-picked list from the first page of my internet search on the title.
Here’s a more general post on Crichton’s works. Remember that the source is leftist-corroded, but it’s the easiest place to find biographical info.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton
Wikipedia gives a fair summary of the substance underlying the contention:
(plot spoilers abound, sorry)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear
Anybody seeing a problem with the list of unhappy readers?
This is demonstrated in most of the reviews I sampled.
The reviewers, however, did not benefit from the last 20 years of events that pretty much confirmed Crichton’s then-ridiculous premise: that people with money and reputations highly dependent on how a crisis is handled would resort to lying and killing (or at least deliberately causing deaths to happen) to implement their own priorities.
How quaint.
https://grist.org/article/schmidt-fear/
Written in 2005: “Michael Crichton’s new novel State of Fear is about global-warming hysteria ginned up by a self-important NGO on behalf of evil eco-terrorists … or by evil eco-terrorists on behalf of a self-important NGO. It’s not quite clear. Regardless, the message of the book is that global warming is a non-problem. A lesson for our times? Sadly, no.”
https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/roam/state-of-fear-michael-crichton.html
Written in 2014: “Sci-author Crichton was an early climate change denier. In the nonfactual State of Fear, we examine how Crichton’s rejection of science led to a miscalculation of future events.”
Judge for yourself if there was a miscalculation or a fairly accurate guess.
https://petebauerbooks.com/review-state-of-fear-by-michael-crichton/
Written in 2022: “Crichton’s writing is as polished as ever and he takes time within the story to present both sides of the issue, challenging publicly held believes with scientific scrutiny, while still telling a fast-moving, surprising and powerful story.
At the heart of Crichton’s novel is the title, State of Fear. Through the narrative, he proposes that powerful entities within society (government, lawyers, media and academia) all benefit from promoting threats in the guise of promoting safety, keeping citizens in a constant state of fear, allowing them to be manipulated.
I can attest to this. In my lifetime numerous public threats have hung over America’s heads. ”
https://secondcompositions.com/2024/10/17/quick-review-state-of-fear-a-book-of-quite-prophetic-but-wrong/
Written in 2024: Doesn’t allow cut-and-paste, but the title is indicative — why are leftists still afraid of this old, “discredited,” book — which they can’t seem to get banned?
Why not let the author tell us what he meant to accomplish by writing it?
https://www.michaelcrichton.com/works/state-of-fear/
I haven’t actually read any of his novels (which kind of surprises me!), but I’ve seen the movies made from several. IMO, “State of Fear” did not diverge from his usual format, but it touched on a topic that was already considered as a “marker” for one’s ideological position, and by presenting a fictional account of global warming being an overhyped crisis driving politics and money-making thus ripe for chicanery and mayhem, he was certainly straying too far into the Left’s “threat” category even then, unlike his other books (at least I don’t see any obvious connections).
How many millions, billions even, of dollars (pick your currency) have been wasted; how many lives have been disrupted or, sadly, ended; and how many careers have been broken by the consequences of government policies and actions that were implemented based on flawed, usually unreplicated, studies — which often boiled down to ONE study hyper-amplified by people with axes to grind and money to grift?
Crichton’s “State of Fear” may have erred by not going far enough.