Palisades Fire Arson Retrial Opens With Narrower Charges, Five Months After a 10-2 Deadlock

Jury selection was set to begin Monday in downtown L.A. for Jonathan Rinderknecht's second trial. Prosecutors have dropped one count and narrowed another to the first, smaller fire, and the judge has yet to rule on how jurors should treat the Fire Department's handling of the first blaze.

By Herald Staff · Nov. 2, 2026, 2:30 PM ET

A federal courthouse wrapped in a blue glass curtain wall that reflects the sky and clouds rises above a stone base and wide public steps at the corner of First Street and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, with an American flag, young street trees, traffic signals and passing cars in the foreground on a sunny day. — The First Street U.S. Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, shown in 2017, where jury selection in Jonathan Rinderknecht's Palisades Fire arson retrial was scheduled to begin Monday. Photo: Daniel L. Lu (cropped) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (license).

Five months after a jury deadlocked 10-2 in favor of acquittal, federal prosecutors went back to court in downtown Los Angeles on Monday to try Jonathan Rinderknecht a second time on charges that he started the fire that grew into the Palisades Fire. Jury selection was scheduled to start at 8:45 a.m. in Courtroom 1 of the First Street federal courthouse before U.S. District Judge Anne Hwang, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Hundreds of prospective jurors were summoned for questioning, MyNewsLA reported, and the court's daily calendar estimates the trial will last seven to 14 days.

Rinderknecht, 30, has pleaded not guilty. He has been in federal custody since his arrest in Florida in October 2025, Reuters reported, and he is the only person criminally charged in connection with either of the January 2025 wildfires that tore through Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

A Narrower Case

Prosecutors are going to trial on a revised indictment. The first trial, which ended in a mistrial in June, covered three counts. The new indictment drops the charge of setting timber afire and rewrites the other two, the Los Angeles Times reported. The destruction-of-property count now covers only the smaller Lachman Fire, which started on New Year's Day 2025. A second count, arson affecting property used in interstate commerce, still seeks to hold him responsible for both the Lachman Fire and the Palisades Fire that broke out on Jan. 7.

In the first trial, the two fires were presented as a single event, NBC Los Angeles reported. Hwang has ruled that the first trial cannot be mentioned in front of the new jury. If convicted, Rinderknecht faces up to 40 years in prison, down from 45 under the original indictment, according to Reuters.

Two Accounts of New Year's Day

Prosecutors' theory is unchanged. They say Rinderknecht, then a part-time Uber driver, used a grill lighter to set hilltop brush on fire around midnight as 2025 began, near the Skull Rock Trailhead above the Palisades' Summit neighborhood. They say anger, loneliness and resentment of wealthy people drove him. Firefighters put out the Lachman Fire quickly, but prosecutors say it kept burning underground in the roots of dense vegetation until Santa Ana winds brought it back to the surface six days later, MyNewsLA reported. In the first trial, prosecutors called more than 30 witnesses and showed surveillance video, cellphone data and fire-pattern analysis. MyNewsLA described that evidence as largely circumstantial.

Defense attorney Steven Haney argues that nothing ties his client to arson. He says New Year's Eve fireworks likely started the Lachman Fire, that the Palisades Fire was a separate blaze, and that Rinderknecht only witnessed the first fire and called 911. "Nobody knows for sure when it started. Everyone is guessing," Haney told jurors in the first trial, according to MyNewsLA.

After an Oct. 22 hearing, Haney said a lighter test that prosecutors ran months after the fire "will be central in trial two," the Times reported. "I don't know why they didn't test the lighter before they charged my client, but they did 11 months later, after the fire," he said.

The Fire Department Question

One open question is how jurors will be told to treat the Los Angeles Fire Department's handling of the first fire. After the June trial, a juror asked why Rinderknecht alone was being held responsible when the Palisades Fire broke out days after firefighters had left the Lachman burn area, the Times reported. In a separate civil lawsuit, firefighters have testified that crews were ordered to roll up their hoses despite warnings that more mop-up work was needed.

Prosecutors asked Hwang to tell jurors to disregard evidence about whether the department did enough to put the fire out. "If the jury is never told that they cannot consider this evidence, another mistrial is all but inevitable," they wrote in a court filing quoted by the Times. Hwang tentatively granted the request in October but said she would make a final decision after the trial begins.

What Is at Stake

The Palisades Fire killed 12 people, burned 23,448 acres and destroyed about 6,500 structures across Pacific Palisades and Malibu, according to the Times and MyNewsLA. The Eaton Fire, which started the same day about 30 miles east, killed 19 people in Altadena. Investigators later traced it to sparks from an electrical transmission tower, Reuters reported.

Both sides have said they expect to win. After the mistrial, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli wrote on X that prosecutors "fully intend to retry this case before a new jury and obtain guilty verdicts on all charged counts." Haney responded: "If they want to re-try it again, we can re-try it again."

Opening statements will follow once a jury is seated.

Original reporting by The Los Angeles Herald, drawing on the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California, the U.S. District Court calendar, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, NBC Los Angeles and MyNewsLA, as linked above.