Prosecutors on Friday disclosed new details in the case of a 29-year-old Highland man accused of starting a massive warehouse fire in Ontario, California, saying the suspect compared himself to Luigi Mangione during a phone call to a witness. Chamel Abdulkarim was being held without bail after being booked on multiple felony counts, and his scheduled arraignment was postponed until Monday.
San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson said Abdulkarim faces one count of aggravated arson and six counts of arson of a structure. The fire erupted around 12:30 a.m. Tuesday at the Kimberly-Clark Distribution Center, destroyed a 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse and $500 million worth of paper products, and left no one injured. Authorities said Abdulkarim was working there through a third-party company when the blaze broke out.
Bill Essayli said the defendant’s comment came in a phone call to one witness. He also said, “Look, America is founded on free enterprise and capitalism. Anyone who attacks our values, our way of life, our system, which provides the best goods and services to the most people, we're gonna come after aggressively.”
Anderson called the case baffling. “Arson to me is a real head-scratcher,” he said. “I do not understand somebody who is suspected of arson does something where they get no value out of it, other than to displace people from their jobs, to ruin commerce, to get in the way of labor, to put people in physical harm. We want to be certain at least for our residents, as sensitive as we are to arson in this county, particularly in Southern California, that these crimes are taken very, very serious.” If convicted as charged, Abdulkarim faces 10 years to life in prison.
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Investigators said they were also reviewing video circulating on social media that may show elements of the fire, including cases of toilet paper being set alight inside a warehouse. In the footage, a person repeatedly says he is not paid enough to live on. Detectives were working to authenticate the clip as part of the ongoing investigation, and police said evidence collected when Abdulkarim was taken into custody after a search warrant was served at his home was being analyzed.
A co-worker, Alex Montero, said he had just met Abdulkarim moments before the fire and there was no immediate suspicion that he was involved. “There was no suspicion that it was him, actually he was missing. So everyone was trying to find him. Everyone was blaming the robots at first. We were almost 100% sure it was the robots until the action in the video of course,” Montero said. The suspect’s booking photo was released as investigators continued to sort through the footage, the witness accounts and the physical evidence.
The fire has already done its damage. The warehouse is gone, the paper products inside it are gone, and the case now turns on what prosecutors can prove about how the fire started and whether the social media video, once authenticated, becomes the clearest link between the suspect and the blaze.
