Arsonist found guilty, faces life sentence for igniting massive Line Fire
Justin Halstenberg, 34, now faces up to life in prison for igniting the nearly 44,000-acre fire in September 2024.
Amongst the seven counts related to the Line Fire and two counts related to a subsequent fire, a jury found Halstenberg guilty of aggravated arson of forest land, property and possession of flammable materials, according to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's Office.
Halstenberg was arrested days after the destructive wildfire erupted.
In a release announcing his arrest, officials with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said Halstenberg was suspected of starting the fire on Sept. 5 in the area of Baseline Road and Alpin Street in Highland.
The blaze displaced thousands of residents who were forced to evacuate due to encroaching flames, as well as prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency and deploy the National Guard to assist in evacuations.
A total of four structures were damaged, one destroyed, six firefighters were injured and about 43,978 acres of land were scorched from the flames that were set by Halstenberg.
The convicted arsonist pleaded not guilty in September to 11 arson-related charges against him.
'Today's guilty verdict on seven counts related to the Line Fire case is a powerful affirmation of justice,' said Dawn Rowe, chair of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
Black mayors of cities Trump decries as ‘lawless' tout significant declines in violent crimes
As President Trump declared Washington, D.C., a crime-ridden wasteland in need of federal intervention last week and threatened similar actions in other Black-led cities, several mayors compared notes. The president's characterization of their cities contradicts what they began noticing last year: that they were seeing a drop in violent crime after a pandemic-era spike. In some cases the declines were monumental, due in large part to more youth engagement, gun buyback programs and community partnerships. Now members of the African American Mayors Assn. are determined to stop Trump from burying accomplishments that they already believed were overlooked. And they're using the administration's unprecedented law enforcement takeover in the nation's capital as an opportunity to disprove his narrative about some of the country's greatest urban enclaves. 'It gives us an opportunity to say we need to amplify our voices to confront the rhetoric that crime is just running rampant around major U.S. cities. It's just not true,' said Van Johnson, mayor of Savannah, Ga., and president of the African American Mayors Assn. 'It's not supported by any evidence or statistics whatsoever.' Trump has deployed the first of 800 National Guard members to the nation's capital, and at his request, the Republican governors of three states pledged hundreds more Saturday. West Virginia said it was sending 300 to 400 Guard troops, South Carolina pledged 200, and Ohio said it would send 150 in the coming days, marking a significant escalation of the federal intervention. Beyond Washington, the Republican president is setting his sights on other cities including Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles and Oakland, calling them crime-ridden and 'horribly run.' One thing they all have in common: They're led by Black mayors. 'It was not lost on any member of our organization that the mayors either were Black or perceived to be Democrats,' Johnson said. 'And that's unfortunate. For mayors, we play with whoever's on the field.' The federal government's actions have heightened some of the mayors' desires to champion the strategies used to help make their cities safer. Trump argued that federal law enforcement had to step in after a prominent employee of his White House advisory team known as the Department of Government Efficiency was attacked in an attempted carjacking. He also pointed to homeless encampments, graffiti and potholes as evidence of Washington 'getting worse.' But statistics published by Washington's Metropolitan Police contradict the president and show violent crime has dropped there since a post-pandemic-emergency peak in 2023. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson scoffed at Trump's remarks, hailing the city's 'historic progress driving down homicides by more than 30% and shootings by almost 40% in the last year alone.' Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, where homicides fell 14% from 2023 to 2024, called the federal takeover in District of Columbia a performative 'power grab.' In Baltimore, officials say they have seen historic decreases in homicides and nonfatal shootings this year, and those have been on the decline since 2022, according to the city's public safety data dashboard. Carjackings were down 20% in 2023, and other major crimes fell in 2024. Only burglaries have climbed slightly. The lower crime rates are attributed to tackling violence with a 'public health' approach, city officials say. In 2021, under Mayor Brandon Scott, Baltimore created a Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan that called for more investment in community violence intervention, more services for crime victims and other initiatives. Scott accused Trump of exploiting crime as a 'wedge issue and dog whistle' rather than caring about curbing violence. 'He has actively undermined efforts that are making a difference saving lives in cities across the country in favor of militarized policing of Black communities,' Scott said via email. The Democratic mayor pointed out that the Justice Department has slashed more than $1 million in funding this year that would have gone toward community anti-violence measures. He vowed to keep on making headway regardless. 'We will continue to closely work with our regional federal law enforcement agencies, who have been great partners, and will do everything in our power to continue the progress despite the roadblocks this administration attempts to implement,' Scott said. Oakland officials this month touted significant decreases in crime in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2024, including a 21% drop in homicides and a 29% decrease in all violent crime, according to the midyear report by the Major Cities Chiefs Assn. Officials credited collaborations with community organizations and crisis response services through the city's Department of Violence Prevention, established in 2017. 'These results show that we're on the right track,' Mayor Barbara Lee said at a news conference. 'We're going to keep building on this progress with the same comprehensive approach that got us here.' After the president gave his assessment of Oakland last week, Lee, a steadfast Trump antagonist during her years in Congress, rejected it as 'fearmongering.' Social justice advocates agree that crime has gone down and say Trump is perpetuating exaggerated perceptions that have long plagued Oakland. Nicole Lee, executive director of Urban Peace Movement, an Oakland-based organization that focuses on empowering communities of color and young people through initiatives such as leadership training and assistance to victims of gun violence, said much credit for the gains on lower crime rates is due to community groups. 'We really want to acknowledge all of the hard work that our network of community partners and community organizations have been doing over the past couple of years coming out of the pandemic to really create real community safety,' Lee said. 'The things we are doing are working.' She worries that an intervention by military troops would undermine that progress. 'It creates kind of an environment of fear in our community,' she said. In Washington, agents from multiple federal agencies, National Guard members and even the United States Park Police have been seen performing law enforcement duties including patrolling the National Mall and questioning people parked illegally. Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said the National Guard troops will not be armed, but he declined to elaborate on their assignments to safety patrols and beautification efforts. Savannah's Johnson said he is all for partnering with the federal government, but troops on city streets is not what he envisioned. Instead, he said, cities need federal assistance for things like multistate investigation and fighting problems such as gun trafficking and cybercrime. 'I'm a former law enforcement officer. There is a different skill set that is used for municipal law enforcement agencies than the military,' Johnson said. There has also been speculation that federal intervention could entail curfews for young people. But that would do more harm, Lee said, disproportionately affecting young people of color and wrongfully assuming that youths are the main instigators of violence. 'If you're a young person, basically you can be cited, criminalized, simply for being outside after certain hours,' she said. 'Not only does that not solve anything in regard to violence and crime, it puts young people in the crosshairs of the criminal justice system.' For now, Johnson said, the mayors are closely watching their counterpart in Washington, Muriel Bowser, to see how she navigates the unprecedented federal intervention. She has been walking a fine line between critiquing and cooperating since Trump's takeover, but things ramped up Friday when officials sued to block the administration's naming its Drug Enforcement Administration chief as an 'emergency' head of the police force. The administration soon backed away from that move. Johnson praised Bowser for carrying on with dignity and grace. 'Black mayors are resilient. We are intrinsically children of struggle,' Johnson said. 'We learn to adapt quickly, and I believe that we will and we are.' Tang writes for the Associated Press.
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Even liberal Maureen Dowd of The Times admits DC is crime-ridden
Proving the old saw that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, one of The New York Time's marquee columnists has agreed — grudgingly, stubbornly, kicking and screaming — that President Donald Trump is right: There's too much crime in the nation's capital. And, just possibly, Washington, DC, currently under Democratic control, could benefit from Trump calling in the National Guard and other feds to help restore law and order. 'It's ridiculous to drag F.B.I. agents from their desks to be cops on the beat. And the tableau of National Guard troops — even unarmed — raises the specter of martial law being normalized and weaponized,' Pulitzer Prize-winning DC-based scribe Maureen Dowd wrote over the weekend. Then, hold your horses, La Dowd suddenly hit the brakes, skidded, and did a complete 180. 'It is also true that many D.C. residents are secretly glad to see more uniforms. No matter what statistics say, they don't feel safe.' This about-face was brought on by her sister's close encounter with slovenly car thieves. As Dowd tells it, she was having dinner with her sibling Peggy in the upscale Georgetown neighborhood recently when the metaphorical mugging zapped the liberal right out of her: Peg's beloved Buick vanished from its parking spot by Maureen's house. 'Two polite officers who responded to our call said they could do little, amid a rash of brazen car thefts by teenagers,' Dowd wrote. 'One officer said that, even if they saw the perp driving in her car, they could not chase him, because of laws passed by the D.C. Council.' Dowd initially seemed to dismiss Trump's hard-core stance on juvenile crime as over-the-top payback against two 15-year-olds charged with assaulting and attempting to carjack a former Department of Government Efficiency employee. That is, until Peggy's Buick showed up in a park in nearby Maryland the morning after it was snatched — still running, nearly out of gas, with a $215 tow charge she was required to pay, Dowd griped. There was a half-eaten pizza, grape soda cans, fast-food wrappers, a used condom and a pair of debit cards inside, Dowd reported. But cops said they could do nothing to nail the fiends. Insult to injury, Peggy soon received more than $1,800-worth of speed-camera tickets for driving 70 miles an hour in a 25 mph zone, and had to prove the car was stolen in order to get the summonses tossed. Dowd's co-workers haven't gotten the message. Last week, shortly after the president declared war on DC crime, The Times worked double-time to minimize the threat. One article refuted Trump's statement that the 2023 murder rate was the highest 'probably ever.' False! crowed the paper. The homicide rate of about 40.4 deaths per 100,000 people was the highest in 26 years, not ever. And in 2024, that number dipped to some 26.6 corpses per 100,000 Washingtonians But Dowd is not favorably impressed. 'While the district's homicide rate has fallen,' she writes, 'it's almost as high as New York's at its most dangerous, in 1990.' Dowd, whose father was a cop, confesses she packs pepper spray these days to protect her from troublemakers when walking around town, a habit she adopted years ago when her mother drove her to her college dorm with a butcher knife on the seat between them. Her mom also gave her a Chinese letter opener with written instructions on how to find the jugular of an assailant. Over the weekend, Times reporters visited DC neighborhoods populated primarily with people of color to find out how residents felt about attempts to wipe out crime. Perhaps surprisingly to the Times, not everyone in these communities opposes being safer. Though every attempt was made to find people who said they did not trust the president, others admitted liking to continue breathing. Dowd summed things up, writing, 'But progressives should not fall into Trump's trap and play down crime, once more getting on the wrong side of an inflammatory issue. As with inflation, they should remember that personal experiences can count more than sanguine statistics. 'Even if Trump is being diabolical, Democrats should not pretend everything is fine here. Because it's not.' Finally — all the news that's fit to print.
CNN
an hour ago
- CNN
DC students head back to school amid Trump focus on cleaning up juvenile crime in the district
In southeast Washington, DC, children stood in line Friday to receive new backpacks filled with school supplies, while community organizers passed out free hot dogs and hamburgers to teenagers to celebrate the last few days of summer before. But just a few blocks away, the sight of National Guard trucks cut into the celebration — a reminder that the school year will begin under the shadow of federal troops. 'This is not going to go off well … most middle school kids walk to school by themselves. They're going to have to walk through soldiers and police,' Dara Baldwin, a DC-based activist on the Free DC advisory council, told CNN. 'They're going to be fearful for their lives. … They're either not going to want to go to school, or they're going to react to these people in their space.' President Donald Trump's deployment of federal law enforcement to the nation's capital to combat what he has described as 'roving mobs of wild youth' has ignited fear among parents, activists and youth advocates that Black and Latino teens will face heightened policing as they return to class next week. When Trump announced he was placing the District of Columbia's police department under federal control and deploying National Guard troops, he argued that youth crime in DC demanded urgent intervention. According to a report from the DC Policy Center, the juvenile arrest rate in DC is nearly double the national rate. Data from the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, an independent DC agency that tracks public safety statistics, shows that total juvenile arrests during the first half of 2025 have largely remained consistent with the number in the first half of each year since 2023, when there was an increase after the Covid-19 pandemic. Looking specifically at juvenile arrests for violent offenses, which includes robberies, aggravated assaults and assaults with a deadly weapon, between 2019 and 2020, they dropped from 585 to 347, as did the overall number of arrests in DC during the beginning of the pandemic. That decline was short-lived: The numbers began climbing again in 2022, rising from 466 arrests for violent offenses to 641 in 2023 before dropping again in 2024 to 496, according to the data from the CJCC. Youth advocates cite the city's investment in more resources and programs targeting young people as part of the reason for the drop in arrests for violent offenses. In 2023, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser issued a declaration of a juvenile crime emergency which focused city resources on addressing the issue. This year the DC Council approved stricter juvenile curfews that also give the city's police chief the ability to double down with even stricter emergency short-term curfews. She used those curfews recently around Navy Yard, an area near the Washington Nationals ballpark and the waterfront. 'It's clear that the target is the inner-city youth,' Kelsye Adams, an activist for DC statehood and director of DC Vote, told CNN at a rally outside of the Metropolitan Police Department headquarters on Friday. 'And what I've seen on the news from where the police checkpoints and the neighborhoods that they're going in, they are directly attacking young, Black and brown kids.' The White House says the administrations policies are aimed at making DC safer. 'Washington DC leaders have failed the city's youth – juvenile crime has been a serious concern for residents and local leaders even before President Trump's intervention to Make DC Safe Again,' Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, told CNN in a statement. 'The status quo of ignoring kids committing violent crimes has not worked, it has only exasperated the situation – President Trump is making DC safe again for everyone.' The DC Metropolitan Police Department did not respond to CNN's request for comment. CNN has spoken to more than a dozen DC residents about Trump's crime crackdown and whether it will impact the children in their communities – and some parents say the extra presence could reduce violence. 'I got mixed reactions with that,' Kim Hall, 45, a longtime district resident who has three children in the DC public school system, told CNN at the backpack event in Anacostia. 'To me, it actually makes the street more safe, because a lot of the crime that goes on, especially over there in southwest and southeast, is happening while the kids are going to school or they're coming out of school.' 'If the police is around, there won't be so much of the gun violence,' she added. Anthony Motley, 76, a DC resident who has 10 grandchildren in the school system, told CNN that young people are 'the future, and we need to protect the future. So, whatever we need to do to protect our future, I'm for that.' Others CNN spoke with, including Sharelle Stagg, a DC resident and educator in the public school system, aren't convinced that increased patrols and law enforcement are going to help their children. 'I'm not certain this is the best strategy, especially when you think about just the way that it was rolled out and kind of presented to communities,' Stag said. Tahir Duckett, executive director of the Center for Innovations in Community Safety at Georgetown Law School, agrees that Trump deploying National Guard troops to DC could make violence worse, not better. 'When you have these major shows of force, and you have people who feel like the police aren't actually part of the community, but are more of an occupying force, then you tend to see people not want to cooperate with the police,' he said, which 'can lead to increased crime rates.' Youth advocates also told CNN they are young Black and Brown men will be the most impacted by the larger law enforcement presence. Black children make up more than half of DC's youth population, according to census data. 'I've been brought up into the community where we've seen this often. So it might look different to some other people, but not me, not the community that I come from, and our communities have been targeted for years,' Carlos Wilson, who works with Alliance of Concerned Men, a group that helps inner-city youth and hosted the back to school event in southeast DC, told CNN. He argued that Trump could use the funding for more resources to help young people in this city instead of on an increased law enforcement presence. 'That's what's gonna make it better, more programs, more opportunities for the younger folks. I think that's what's gonna make our community better. Not police presence. We need resources. We need help, not people coming in.'
