Los Angeles, California: Palisades Fire Retrial Opens With Jury Selection for Jonathan Rinderknecht

Jury selection was due to begin on Monday, November 2, in federal court in downtown Los Angeles in the retrial of Jonathan Rinderknecht, the man prosecutors say set the fire that became the Palisades fire. The Justice Department lists jury selection starting at 8:45 a.m. Pacific time in Courtroom 1 of the Mendez United States Courthouse on West First Street, before Judge Anne Hwang.

Rinderknecht, 30, is a former Uber driver with dual United States and French citizenship. His first trial lasted three weeks and ended in a hung jury in late June, deadlocked 10 to 2 in favor of acquittal, with no unanimous verdict on any of the three charges. Judge Hwang declared a mistrial, and prosecutors brought a new indictment that dropped one original charge and changed the two remaining arson counts. He faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted as charged under the new indictment. The original indictment carried a maximum of 45 years.

The fire prosecutors describe

Prosecutors say Rinderknecht maliciously started a brush fire on January 1, 2025, that firefighters put out but that kept smoldering in dense scrub roots. Days later, fierce winds rekindled it into the Palisades fire, which laid waste to Pacific Palisades. The fire killed 12 people and burned nearly 7,000 homes and other structures, with losses estimated at 150 billion dollars.

The Palisades fire erupted at almost the same time as the Eaton fire in Eaton Canyon, about 30 miles east, which killed 19 people in Altadena and which investigators later traced to sparks from an electrical transmission tower. Together, the two January 7 fires rank as the deadliest wildfire calamity in Los Angeles County history, passing the 29 lives lost in the Griffith Park fire of 1933. Rinderknecht is the only person criminally charged in connection with either fire.

Two accounts of January 1

Defense lawyers say he was wrongly accused. They told the first jury that holiday fireworks set the hilltop blaze, not their client, and that the Palisades inferno a week later was a separate fire set by someone else. Defense attorney Steve Haney argued that prosecutors had no physical evidence tying him to arson and no records showing intent, and suggested his client was being scapegoated for Los Angeles Fire Department failures.

Rinderknecht, a onetime Pacific Palisades resident, pleaded not guilty and did not testify at his first trial. In a court declaration filed in March, he denied willfully starting any fire. He said he saw the January 1 fire, first called the Lachman fire, from a hill he had climbed to watch New Year fireworks, called 911, and stayed until firefighters arrived and offered to help.

Prosecutors told the first jury that, during that 911 call, Rinderknecht asked the ChatGPT app whether someone could be found at fault for lighting a fire because of his cigarettes, and that the app answered yes. They also said camera footage and cellphone location data placed him as the only person near the start of the blaze, close to a trail in the Santa Monica Mountains.

The charges

A grand jury first indicted Rinderknecht on October 15, 2025, on one count of destruction of property by means of fire, one count of arson affecting property used in interstate commerce, and one count of timber set afire, according to the Justice Department. He has been in custody since his arrest in Florida in October 2025. The jury picked this week will hear the same dispute that split the first panel: one January 1 fire that never truly went out, or two separate fires with two separate causes.