San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
THE EVIDENCE BURNS AWAY
As California’s wildfire crisis exploded, the state assigned 30 officers to follow a suspected arsonist. Could they thwart disaster?
The summer of 2007 arrived hot and dry in Northern California, full of possibility for a big blaze, full of promise for a young prison inmate who dreamed of fighting one.
Drugs and guns had landed him in minimum security, but California couldn’t be picky about who fought its infernos. Good behavior soon earned him a spot on the prison camp’s firefighting crew. By July, he moved up from a grunt position ripping tree stumps and grass from the dirt to operating a chain saw.
The work suited him well, with his tall and rangy build; his helmet and bright orange fire suit covered his shaggy hair and tattooed arms. His crew often worked near Whiskeytown Lake outside Redding, men crisscrossing the mountains in two even lines, tools balanced on shoulders.
The year had already been bad, with the Angora Fire blasting into South Lake Tahoe. It would soon get much worse. And a historic drought lingered on the horizon, one that would prime the state’s forests for a series of catastrophes over many seasons. By 2020, the flames would level entire communities, form into deadly fire tornadoes and cast the sky over San Francisco an apocalyptic redorange.
The inmate spent his days downing trees and dousing small flareups. But he longed to fight a “career fire” — a blaze so huge and intense that it would keep his crew on the front lines for weeks, if not months. There’d be a sprawling base camp with a mess hall, a makeshift hospital, even a laundry. Lunch would come heavy in brown paper bags. And in the surrounding communities, residents would offer thanks, hanging homemade signs on fence posts and mailboxes.
In such a fire, he thought, he could finally be the man he wanted to be. A hero.
But these were visions. One day, he cut through a thicket of wild blackberry tangled with poison oak and was sent off for a steroid shot. Before he could return to fire duty, his sentence ended and he was released from prison. He headed home to dry Lake County.
The fire had been burning for at least six minutes at a popular trailhead near the town of Clearlake when Mike Thompson pulled up in his sport utility vehicle.
It was 7: 30 a. m. on July 2, 2015, and Thompson, an investigator for the state’s Cal Fire agency, was worried. The season was in full swing. Conditions were dangerous. And this new blaze was threatening to climb out of a steep ravine.
Thompson, 35, had driven four hours to Clearlake, the largest town in Lake County, from his office in Humboldt County. A battalion chief and sworn officer, he had spent nearly a decade investigating fires. Now his expertise was badly needed. Within five months, 45 small fires had ignited in Lake County, some during red flag warnings that alert the public to the threat of uncontrollable spread.
On this morning at the trailhead, Thompson’s colleagues managed to put out the flames. Then their radios crackled. A mile down Highway 20, someone had reported a second fire. This was odd. As the engine of firefighters sped off in response, Thompson stayed behind. He needed to figure out the cause of this first fire, fast. On the gravel turnout, he used string and nails to thread a grid, each side measuring 8 feet. His job was to scrutinize what was left behind, square by square.
The investigator walked the grid in slow circles. Bending down, he studied the grass blades, which char in the direction of a fire’s origin, victims pointing to the culprit. Thompson examined the staining, or heat damage, on the gravel, which can also reveal how flames move. And he looked under rocks, which can conceal an ignition device, such as paper or matches.
Thompson did not find things he often found in other investigations — no spent firecracker or cigarette butt, no runaway campfire, no sign of a lightning strike or metal from a vehicle scraping on asphalt. His examination of the second fire down the highway would turn up little more. On his forms, Thompson twice marked, “Undetermined.”
But the investigator had a strong hunch. The timing of the two fires, so close together, was a hallmark of a category he knew well.
Serial arson.
What Thompson didn’t know then was that Lake County, known for its wineries and hideaway resorts and massive Clear Lake at its center — and for the pervasive poverty that forces many of its 64,000 residents to live handtomouth — was about to become the center of California’s growing wildfire crisis.
That someone would intentionally set fires here, of all places, seemed cruel, Thompson thought. Toeing the ash of the second fire, he wondered: Who would do this, and why? All he knew was that if a committed firebug was at work, more blazes would follow.
Arson is unique in that the evidence usually burns away, the crime covering itself up. Roughly 80% of cases end without an arrest, and less than 1% yield a conviction.
Thompson needed help. Soon, a halfdozen investigators joined him in Lake County. His colleagues went undercover, growing beards and buying clothes at the Walmart in Clearlake, blending into a community where cowboy hats and boots are commonplace. They rented old cars and stayed at a hotel in Middletown, south of the lake. When locals inquired, they said they were assigned to a bug infestation project.
At the heart of their mission was a risky calculation: How much evidence would they need to make the case, to convict, to lock up a suspect? How often would they need to hold back, to keep building their case, never knowing whether the next blaze would be the big one, while praying that it wasn’t?
Sometimes, to catch an arsonist, you have to do the unthinkable.
Let him set more fires.
Damin Pashilk liked to say he’d always been something of a “black sheep” — though it wasn’t quite true. He was born in January 1976 into a solid workingclass family in San Francisco’s Richmond District. He had two older sisters who adored him.
When he was an infant, his family moved to San Rafael for work. His father was a union painter; his mother did data entry for a company in Corte Madera. They divorced when he was young, and she relocated the children to Napa. Pashilk’s father wasn’t around much after that.
His mother worked long hours, so Pashilk and his sisters spent most afternoons with the family across the street. The couple gave them baskets of candy on Easter, and the father treated Pashilk like his own son. He even took the preteen on special trips to Great America amusement park in Santa Clara. But there was a sinister side to this charity, Pashilk would later say: The neighbor molested him.
Afterward, he found himself crying all the time. Even the corniest television commercials, for shampoo or cereal, could wreck him. His sisters’ friends offered him beer and weed. He liked that these things made him feel less.
His mother didn’t take well to his new drug habit. She ripped his bedroom door off the hinges, screwed shut the windows and confiscated his stereo. The teenager stole her Volvo station wagon for a drive to the skate park. When he returned home the evening of the joy ride, a patrol car was parked on the curb. Exasperated, his mother threatened him with juvenile hall. But he didn’t care, he would later say, and his behavior worsened. He sold marijuana from his school locker and stole a classmate’s expensive skateboard. When the boy confronted him, Pashilk beat him up.
As his trouble mounted, the courts shipped Pashilk to the nowshuttered Bear Creek Boys Ranch in San Joaquin County, an alternative to jail for youth who had committed relatively minor crimes. At 13, he was the youngest child there. The instructors, he later said, were always yelling at him for crying.
His teenage years were a churn: more drugs, another juvenile hall trip, drug treatment. He managed to graduate high school on time, thanks to a continuation program.
Pashilk wanted to be more like his sisters. One had become a nurse, the other a homemaker. He decided to enlist in the Marines. He had some time before he was required to report for basic training, and when a friend offered $ 10 a day and as much food and beer as he wanted to help clean up a compound of properties, Pashilk moved to Clearlake.
Instead of opportunity, Pashilk found methamphetamine — more potent at erasing his emotions than anything he’d tried before. When he couldn’t pass a drug test, the Marines dropped Pashilk as a recruit.
He stayed in Lake County and worked as a handyman, trying to be useful to those around him. But addiction strangled his life. He moved down the street from the compound, into a trailer that had neither running water nor electricity. The property owner, a woman named Ginger Cinollo, tried to look out for Pashilk, making him breakfasts of eggs and hash browns.
She found him to be a hard worker, someone who would help out anybody. “Even for free,” Cinollo said. “If you needed help, he’d be there for you.”
Here, Pashilk met Carla, a waif of a woman with bleached blonde hair and pale blue eyes.
She penciled in her eyebrows, freezing an expression of disbelief. She, too, was addicted to drugs. The couple had two children together, a boy and a girl. Pashilk named his daughter after her greatgrandmother; he gave his son his own name.
One evening, through a haze of meth, Pashilk registered dirt under his son’s tiny fingernails. This was not the kind of father he had dreamed of becoming.
When Pashilk went to prison for five years in 2002, convicted on drug possession and firearm charges, he left Carla to raise the kids on her own. She continued using, and a neighbor reported her to Child Protective Services. The agency put the toddlers in foster care, then up for adoption. A couple from nearby Lakeport offered to take both children. This had been important to Pashilk. He had wanted them to be together.
Later, after he finished his prison sentence, and after he fathered a third child he rarely saw with another woman, Pashilk flipped through the adoption agreement. In one section, the names of his children’s new parents hadn’t been blacked out. He looked them up online.
Their new father, he discovered, was a firefighter.
A hero.
As part of their investigation, Mike Thompson and his Cal Fire colleagues hid surveillance cameras along roads in Lake County, seeking to confirm their suspicion that an arsonist was on the loose.
They hoped to capture a car driving by the spots where fires had broken out.
After the trailhead fire in July 2015, there was an apparent break: A Cal Fire urban forester from Sacramento, hunkered down in his office to watch the camera footage, logged that a green Subaru Legacy had sped toward the apparent crime scene. Minutes later, the Subaru had passed the camera again, squealing away in the opposite direction. No other vehicles were captured on film.
In the next six weeks, four more suspicious fires ignited in Lake County, burning closer to homes and businesses. On one occasion, two women driving to a wine tasting noticed a small fire on the roadside. They pulled over and used water bottles to douse the flames.
Another time, an 8yearold girl playing in her front yard spotted a green Subaru parked on a turnout across the street. The driver flicked something out the window, into the tall yellow grass. As the car sped off, the roadside burst into flames. Thompson and the team had no idea who the driver was. The Subaru’s license plate came back to a dead woman. Even if they had known their suspect’s identity, they didn’t want to bring him in for questioning just yet — not until they had proof he had set the fires.
In the meantime, they had to be careful not to spook the man. The team knew arsonists tend to stick with routine, working within comfort zones: familiar roads and terrain, favored ignition devices. Any interruption — including the sight of a witness or perceived follower — could trigger a change in tactics.
One day, investigators tailed the Subaru to a property on Koloko Street in Clearlake. Concrete steps led to a sagging American flag by the front door. Blue tarps, piled with firewood and construction materials, blanketed the yard. A pair of dilapidated trailers sat nearby.
Now they knew where their suspect lived. But they didn’t want to stake out the place and risk being seen. So Thompson’s boss, incident commander James Engel, suggested putting a GPS tracking device under the Subaru. Through a cell phone app, investigators would be able to follow the car in real time.
On Aug. 17, 2015, Engel asked a judge to approve a warrant to use the tracker, a steel contraption with four heavyduty magnets. The commander, in his affidavit to the court, ended with a warning: Additional fires could produce “catastrophic results.”
Five days later, the investigators tracked the Subaru to a gas station in Clearlake and secretly snapped a few photographs of the driver.
The man was tall, broadshouldered and muscular, with a large, birdlike nose and messy brown hair. Tattoos peeked from beneath his shirtsleeves. His teeth were brown and rotted. He filled his tank, then hooked south on Highway 29 toward Middletown, the same hamlet of 1,300 people where the Cal Fire team had booked hotel rooms.
For 18 miles, the investigators tailed him.
The man parked at Twin Pine Casino & Hotel. He ducked inside, chainsmoking cigarettes as he played the slot machines. From across the room, the investigators watched closely. They took a few more photos.
Within the week, they found a match on social media. Their suspect had a name: Damin Anthony Pashilk.
Two years earlier, Pashilk had gone out for a pack of cigarettes and returned home to find his place on fire.
He was 37 and living with his girlFirebug
friend in a mobile home park northwest of Clearlake. She was in the park’s communal showers when an electrical hookup in their trailer sparked. Within seconds, the home was engulfed.
The fire had already ripped through two trailers and was gnawing on a third when Pashilk jumped out of his car. He knew the woman next door wasn’t home, and that her dog and two cats were likely inside. Maybe he could save them.
It had been six years since Pashilk had spent those three months as a firefighter at Trinity River. The prison camp in rugged Trinity County is one of dozens of minimumsecurity facilities where the state trains lowerlevel offenders to fight fires. Before 2020’ s pandemic, inmates typically made up as much as 40% of the men and women who battled blazes across California.
They earned just $ 2 a day — plus an extra $ 2 for every hour on the fire line — but it was more than the 8 to 37 cents daily that other prisoners made. If you had to do time, Pashilk liked to explain, this was the best way to do it. Out in the wilderness, not caged behind bars.
Pashilk had become familiar with doing time and had been charged with more than 20 crimes in Lake, Shasta and Yolo counties. He liked to collect guns, targetshooting in the woods off Highway 20, never minding that it was illegal for a felon like himself to own one. Once, officers arrived at a friend’s house with a search warrant. Pashilk answered the door with a loaded handgun — then ran away in a bid to hide it.
In the words of Mark Dingley, the longtime partner of Pashilk’s sister, Pashilk was “kind of a bonehead.” Though he kept trying to find respectable work, Pashilk “couldn’t get on anywhere that was credible.”
Pashilk had fared better at the prison fire camp, where he’d been a fast learner and hard worker. He liked to boast that he had run a 6: 14 mile, mastered the chain saw and memorized the “Ten Standard Fire Orders.” Known as the Tens, the guidelines have been drilled into firefighters for more than 40 years, instilling a deep respect for the craft.
Now, Pashilk forced his way into his neighbor’s trailer. As he broke her window, the rush of fresh air caused the fire to explode. The pets were nowhere in sight, and the inferno had now become too hot. He had to retreat.
So much was lost. The animals, his small boat, his dirt bike, family photos, the urn containing his father’s ashes. Worse still, it was Pashilk’s fault. The blaze, an investigator determined, stemmed from a makeshift electrical connection that Pashilk had haphazardly rigged up.
Pashilk and his girlfriend watched as firefighters hosed down the trailers. They had only the clothes on their backs. The manager of the park, unimpressed with Pashilk’s novice handyman work, let them know they weren’t welcome to move into another unit. Before long, he’d end up back in the trailer owned by Cinollo on Koloko Street.
Friends established a GoFundMe account, raising $ 1,200 to help the couple. In a photo at the top of the online fundraiser, Pashilk wears a gray stocking cap and a 49ers crewneck, holding his small, tawny dog, Bandit. His girlfriend stands next to him, dwarfed by his size. Their faces are solemn, the wreckage of their lives spread behind them.
He would later say, sometimes, that he would not wish such a loss on anyone.
Firestarting is so potentially damaging, and so often compulsive, that the state Department of Justice maintains a special registry of about 4,000 arsonists. Upon release from prison, arsonists, like sex offenders, must notify law enforcement where they plan to live. They are required to check in every year for the rest of their lives.
Arsonists are popularly believed to be seeking sexual gratification, but that’s true in only 3.5% of cases, according to a 2017 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry. More often, arsonists seek relief from emotional distress. Other studies have shown that arsonists tend to lack social skills and struggle to express their feelings through “normal means.”
Fires are rarely set for one reason alone; instead, motivations fall across a spectrum: excitement or anger, revenge or sport, profit or crime concealment, control or heroism.
In 1986, the FBI created a special group to study the personalities of serial arsonists. Interviewing more than 80 convicts in jails and prisons, these experts found that firesetters were predominantly young white men who lacked stability and had cold or distant relationships with their families. Around 70% had a prior felony arrest.
There was something else: About 95% had some interest in the fire service. Some had been firefighters.
Every year, more than 100 firefighters are arrested for arson, according to the National Volunteer Fire Council. Investigator Thompson had witnessed this irony: Once, while he was working as a captain at a fire camp in Tehama County, a colleague from the Forest Service was caught in the act. The man explained he was releasing pentup emotions after tough 911 calls, Thompson said.
The FBI research found that serial arsonists tended to scout areas where they planned to light a fire. At the moment of ignition, they rarely considered that they might destroy homes and kill people. Afterward, they liked to return to study their handiwork. Some even stuck around to offer advice or to try to help put the fire out.
And they weren’t content to set just one fire. They’d return to light another. And another.
A few weeks after the Cal Fire team put the tracker on the green Subaru in 2015, local police — unaware an arson investigation was under way — picked up Pashilk for driving with a suspended license. They impounded his car and booked him into Lake County Jail.
California’s fire season historically lasts from May through October. While Pashilk was in jail, a series of major blazes ripped across Lake County. The biggest, the Valley Fire, killed four people and incinerated nearly 2,000 structures.
Investigators had tried hard to get through the year without such a disaster. But the Valley Fire wasn't linked to arson — it was the result of an accident: faulty wiring for a hot tub.
The investigation was shelved for the year.
The sound from the road below Joy Fleming’s home outside Middletown immediately annoyed her. Out of town drivers were always speeding through the residential area. In her darkest moments, Fleming thought they deserved to crash.
It was July 23, 2016, and Fleming, 54, had been out in her horse pasture, enjoying the relative cool of the evening after another tripledigit day in Lake County. She and her husband lived on a knoll above Western Mine Road, a narrow track dimpled with divots and potholes. The road branched off Highway 20 — a fourminute drive from Twin Pine Casino — and was notoriously difficult to navigate.
The year’s fire season had opened quietly. Fleming knew this was a blessing. Lake County was still recovering from the previous year.
Around 7 p. m. that Saturday, as Fleming crossed the grassy field toward her horses, she again heard the distinct rumbling noise: a vehicle barreling down the road. Fleming prickled with frustration. She walked toward the edge of the hillside to get a better view. The driver, Fleming would later tell police, was a man with a “large Roman nose.”
A few hundred yards away, she saw a curl of smoke in the blue sky.
Suspicious fires stacked up that summer.
July 17: On Crestview Drive, an oak shaded stretch of road near the shores of Honeymoon Cove, a private beach lined with rustic cabins.
July 21: On Morgan Valley Road, near a family’s small farm and less than a halfmile from one of Cal Fire’s surveillance cameras.
July 23: Below Joy Fleming’s home on Western Mine Road.
July 26: On the edge of Sulphur Bank Road, where a city roadworker tried beating the flames out with a shovel. When firefighters arrived, the man rounded his arms, showing investigators the fire had been the size of a beach ball.
It was civilians who kept putting the fires out — and inadvertently destroying fragile evidence. At another fire on Highway 29, a man used his sweatshirt to swat out the flames, even as an officer implored him to stop, wanting to preserve the crime scene. The man thought the officer, in his undercover
disguise, was insane.
Every new fire represented a gamble by the state of California. But the investigators needed conclusive evidence. Thirty of them had now been assigned to the case, trading off 24hour shifts. While Thompson, in his official uniform, worked openly as an investigator, Cal Fire Battalion Chief Branden Smith went undercover, once posing as a freelance photographer.
Smith, normally based in Riverside County, had tailed Pashilk the previous summer. By 2016, he had observed the man — now out of county jail — upward of 100 times. Pashilk was driving a new vehicle: a gold Chrysler Sebring. Like the Subaru, it was registered to someone else. Like the Subaru, it now carried a secret GPS device on its underbelly.
Smith’s job was to know Pashilk’s habits. And by now he knew them well.
Pashilk always woke up late. He often started his day with a drive to the lake to fish or smoke pot. He rarely took a direct route anywhere, unless he was in a rush. He appeared fidgety and restless, sometimes spending fewer than five minutes playing the Twin Pine Casino slots. From what Smith could observe, Pashilk didn’t seem to have a regular job, though he sometimes tinkered with small projects at friends’ homes.
On July 27, Smith headed to another blaze, this time on Lakeshore Drive. It was at least the fifth fire in 10 days. Flames spread through 15 acres of parched grassland before firefighters managed to put them out.
Thompson responded to investigate the fire’s cause. As he studied the edge of Lakeshore Drive, he noticed a cupped depression in the grass. Something had burned there; something that didn’t belong. In the center of the depression was a smattering of white ash. He suspected the fire had been started with a paper product — a napkin, perhaps — that had burned up.
He knew though, that the evidence in front of him wouldn’t be enough to prove arson in court. He was frustrated. He wanted to make the arrest, but couldn’t. The blazes would continue.
Two days later, on July 29, a fire ignited on Ogulin Canyon Road. A couple were latching a speedboat trailer to their truck in the lot of a storage facility when they saw flames pounce on an oak tree. The fire blackened more than 25 acres and burned down a cabin.
One of Cal Fire’s hidden cameras recorded Pashilk driving away from the area in the Sebring. He beat the fire engines by a few minutes.
Smith slouched in his rental car, studying the surveillance app on his cell phone.
It was about 5 p. m. on Aug. 9, 2016, as he monitored the Sebring’s moves. Departing Twin Pine Casino in Middletown, Pashilk headed north on Highway 29 before turning right onto Clayton Creek Road. He briefly slowed, then sped toward a nearby gas station to fill up.
Pashilk then moved west on Highway 29, turning left onto winding Seigler Canyon Road. Smith watched as the dot on his screen traveled. Then it paused, remaining motionless for one minute before retracing its path on Seigler Canyon and returning to the highway
Smith did not follow, instead continuing down Seigler Canyon. As he turned a corner, smoke choked the air. Flames climbed a steep slope; two homes stood at the top. Thompson arrived soon after and called the fire into dispatch. An unoccupied home, a toolshed and an outbuilding were ablaze.
Air tankers soon droned overhead, unleashing loads of pink fireretardant slurry. Thompson studied the scene. About 6 feet from the fog line on the highway, in the burned grass, he saw the ghost of a twisted napkin, wrung tight as if by someone’s hands. The brittle form quivered in the wind.
Thompson pulled off his helmet and rushed to cover the napkin. When the wind died down, he snapped a photo, then another and another, until he had at least 40 pictures of the charred napkin from every angle. Carefully, he used a cotton ball to nudge the evidence onto an index card.
As he held it in his hands, he watched it disintegrate.
Thompson’s boss needed to make a decision. He studied the photos of the napkin.
Engel, the Cal Fire incident commander, knew this was good evidence of arson. Better yet, the GPS tracker on Pashilk’s car had placed him on Seigler Canyon Road just before the fire. Still, Engel wondered if the case could be stronger. It had to hold up in court. But they had no eyewitness, no definitive proof the napkin had started the fire.
Engel held off bringing charges. He wanted to keep the investigation going.
Instead of wrapping the case, he sent his investigators to retrace the route Pashilk had taken the previous afternoon. Before heading to Seigler Canyon, Pashilk had briefly slowed on Clayton Creek Road.
On the roadside, investigators found a scorched matchbook, printed with two gold trees. The Twin Pine Casino logo.
At 4: 52 p. m. on Aug. 13 — four days later — the investigators watched as Pashilk turned once again off Highway 29. His Sebring disappeared down Clayton Creek Road, past the spot where they had discovered the matchbook. The officer tailing him dropped back. Pashilk spent one minute and 30 seconds on the route before making a Uturn.
He peeled back onto the highway.
The investigator continued around the bend.
Fire was everywhere. Feasting on droughtparched grass on the side of the road, urged on by the wind, the flames were already too intense to be tamed there. They were sweeping north through oak and heavy brush toward town. Using his handheld radio, the Cal Fire investigator called for immediate evacuations in Lower Lake, a mile away and directly in the path of the wildfire.
Thompson arrived, his stomach dropping. Not 500 feet from where his team had found the Twin Pine matchbook, Thompson spotted the ignition point. What would be the final, damning bit of evidence was plainly visible: a partially melted Otter Pop wrapper.
The wildfire it started — the Clayton Fire — became one of Lake County’s worst, inflicting $ 22.7 million of damage. Within hours, thousands of people fled their homes, not knowing what would await them when they returned. Flames trapped some residents on their streets, live electrical lines lacing the ground. Thompson at one point abandoned his truck to rescue a boy who had taken shelter in a swimming pool.
More than 300 structures burned, with few people in Lower Lake spared from the wreckage. The principal of the local elementary school lost her home. The historic Lower Lake firehouse burned, as did the office of Habitat for Humanity, which had been rebuilding homes destroyed in the previous summer’s fires. Hundreds of people — already bearing the emotional scars of past disasters — were left homeless.
On Main Street, the blaze consumed the house where Carrie Johnson lived with her husband and their 31yearold daughter, Catherine, who had been diagnosed with cancer at 25 and relied on inhome hospice care. Catherine died three weeks later in an extendedstay hotel, asking her mother why her family couldn’t go home, not understanding that it was gone. When investigators caught up with
Pashilk that evening, he was sitting on the hood of his Sebring, watching the fire burn. Parked outside a Jack in the Box, cattycorner from the Walmart, he’d found a high spot with sweeping views of Lower Lake. A smoke column swept across the sky.
Pashilk, dressed in dark shorts and a black shirt with the sleeves cut off, chatted with a few people curious about what they were witnessing. His career fire.
Two days later, a deputy picked him up at a traffic stop near his home, arresting him for driving on a suspended license and bringing him in for questioning. As he drove Pashilk to the Sheriff ’ s Office in Lakeport, investigators searched his Sebring, noticing the ash scattered across the passenger seat, and the trailer on Koloko Street, even checking beneath the cage of his roommate’s pet boa constrictor.
At the two locations, they collected a plastic Otter Pop wrapper along with eight burned matches, more matchbooks from Twin Pine Casino, a police scanner, metal spoons scorched from methamphetamine use, a birthday card and two newspapers from that day. The Clayton Fire filled the front pages.
They also found a napkin, twisted like licorice.
Meanwhile, at the Sheriff’s Office, a lieutenant settled Pashilk in a small interview room. He unsnapped his handcuffs and handed him a glass of water. When the officer left to talk with Engel, Pashilk pulled a baggie from his sock. He swallowed it, and the two grams of meth inside, nearly choking.
He would have to go to the hospital. Engel tasked Thompson with transporting him. Before they departed, officers searched Pashilk.
In his pockets were 35 cents and a lighter.
There were so many times in his life, Damin Pashilk says, when he hadn’t been the man he wished he could be. He wanted to be a father that his children — wherever they were — looked up to. Maybe he could have turned out like his older sisters. Maybe he could have been a good person who did good things.
There was an incident, just a year before the Clayton Fire, that Pashilk had thought about often. A friend had come to him with a problem. She was growing marijuana, illegally, on her property. Squatters had piggybacked on her idea, planting their own grow on the edge of her land. They’d siphoned water from her spring, too.
She wanted them gone. But she couldn’t call the police.
Pashilk had looked back on his days at fire camp, crossing the mountains with his chain saw and his crew. He had felt so useful. Purposeful. He told the woman he’d see what he could do.
Late that summer, he set fire to the squatters’ pot patch. The flames burned about 13 acres, then petered off safely, hurting no one, he recalls. His friend was so happy with him.
On the day of Pashilk’s arrest, several miles from the jail, the authorities held a news conference at Twin Pine Casino. A group of men — firefighters, sheriff’s deputies, local elected officials — gathered behind a podium, near a tripod covered with a white sheet. Residents filtered into rows of folding chairs.
“We that call Lake County home know that the fire activity we’ve been experiencing over the last couple years is definitely not normal,” said Sheriff Brian Martin. “Fires don’t just simply start.”
As he announced the arrest of Pashilk, he stripped the sheet off the tripod to reveal the arsonist’s mugshot. From the audience came jeering and booing. A man flipped off Pashilk’s photo; a woman sobbed against a relative’s shoulder.
“Thank you, Jesus!”
“You’re going to hell, bud!”
“String him up! String him up!”
The evening news had just flicked on at Sutter Lakeside Hospital in Lakeport as Thompson and Pashilk arrived. A news anchor detailed the devastation wrought by the Clayton Fire. Homeowners in Lower Lake cried as they talked about what had been lost. Children described how fall classes were about to start, but their backpacks and school supplies had burned.
Thompson watched as Pashilk went from sitting upright to almost melting into a hard plastic chair in a hospital room, his hands cuffed behind his back. He shook his head, chin tucked into his left shoulder. He wouldn’t make eye contact with Thompson, his gaze fixed on the floor.
He mumbled something. Thompson couldn’t hear him. He closed the door and asked Pashilk to repeat himself. Still, the investigator couldn’t make out what Pashilk said. “Never mind,” the arsonist said, “it wasn’t important.” Then he told Thompson, “Sometimes I think you get misled or sidetracked, or whatever you want to call it. And sometimes those side roads could be our demise, you know?”
“How’d you get there?” Thompson asked.
“I don’t know exactly — where or when, it’s been too long.”
The news report in the other room continued: lives in jeopardy, homes destroyed, pets killed. Listening, Pashilk shook his head again.
“Fucking bullshit,” he muttered. Scooting his chair closer, until he was facetoface with Pashilk, Thompson asked what he meant by that. Pashilk bit his lip, tears streaking his face. For a moment, the two men were quiet.
“What’s that?” the investigator finally asked.
“Life.”