Suspected LA Arsonist Allegedly Created Eerie Pictures Of Burning Cities, Felt ‘Liberated’ Setting Bible On Fire

The alleged arsonist responsible for the January 2025 Palisades fire asked the AI program ChatGPT to create an image of a burning city and said he burned a Bible, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

Federal prosecutors announced that 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht has been charged with one count of “Destruction of Property by Means of Fire” on Wednesday. Acting United States Attorney Bill Essayli of the Central District of California said during a press conference that a wealth of “digital evidence” pointed to Rinderknecht, including several images generated showing a city on fire and text prompts suggesting he had burned a copy of the Bible.

“The allegations in the affidavit supported by digital evidence, including the defendant’s ChatGPT prompt of a dystopian painting showing, in part, a burning forest and a crowd fleeing from it and we’re going to put that up on the screen here once we get that going,” Essayli said. “The allegations – they are it is – that is from his ChatGPT, that’s an image he produced a few months before the fire started that shows the city being burnt there.”

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“The allegations are further supported by the defendant’s cell phone, his false statements to law enforcement and his behavior during the Lachman fire, which the defendant is charged with maliciously starting shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day of this year and which eventually became the Palisades fire,” Essayli continued.

Rinderknecht allegedly requested the images in July 2024, according to the indictment, roughly six months before the area around Los Angeles was hit with multiple wildfires