Prosecutors to Retry Gene Atkins for Murder in 2018 Trader Joe's Killing

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli quickly announced that his office will retry the case. The jury initially indicated it had reached a verdict before announcing it was at a "standstill" with some jurors "unwilling to change their opinion." Jurors wrote a note stating, "There is nothing the court can do to assist the jury in their deliberations. Additional instructions or rereading the testimony would not help in deliberations. Unfortunately we cannot reach a unanimous verdict." Rinderknecht, 30, faced three arson counts: destruction of property by means of fire, arson affecting property used in interstate commerce, and timber set afire, carrying up to 45 years in prison. The Lachman Fire was named for a street near the Skull Rock Trailhead. Prosecutors used witness statements, video surveillance, cell phone data, and analysis of fire dynamics and patterns, though evidence was largely circumstantial. The defense argued the first fire was likely caused by errant New Year's Eve fireworks, and Rinderknecht was a part-time Uber driver who called 911 to report it. Prosecutors said Rinderknecht used a grill lighter to ignite vegetation around midnight on Dec. 31, 2024.

A federal judge declared a mistrial on Friday, June 26, after the jury in the trial of the man accused of starting the devastating Palisades fire announced it could not reach a verdict on any of the three charges. U.S.

District Judge Anne Hwang polled the jury, and each member confirmed that further deliberations would not break the deadlock. The mistrial sets the stage for a potential retrial if federal prosecutors choose to pursue the case again.

The trial centered on the Lachman fire, which authorities say began on January 1, 2025, when the defendant, identified as Rinderknecht, allegedly used a long-handled BIC lighter to ignite brush on a hillside in the Hidden Buddha area of Pacific Palisades. The fire was initially extinguished but smoldered underground for six days before re-emerging on January 7, 2025, as the Palisades fire.

Driven by Santa Ana winds, the Palisades fire burned over 23,500 acres across Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and other areas, killing 12 people and destroying or damaging more than 7,500 homes and businesses.

During the two-week trial, prosecutors presented testimony from over a dozen witnesses and argued that Rinderknecht, motivated by anger over wealth inequality and climate change, deliberately set the fire. Assistant U.S.

Attorney Danbee Kim told the jury, "He went up a hill in a neighborhood in the Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood he personally associated with his personal history with wealth and rejection. And when he went up that hill, he took this lighter with him." The defense countered that the fire could have been started by a firework or another person, and criticized the investigation for beginning 12 days after the Lachman fire, by which time the scene may have been altered by fire suppression efforts, the subsequent Palisades fire, winds, or hikers.

Rinderknecht did not testify in his own defense. The jury began deliberations on Wednesday, but by Friday morning, the judge and attorneys agreed that no progress was possible.

Outside the courtroom, defense attorney Steve Haney said his client was struggling with the uncertainty. "There is a lot of anxiety, you can imagine, your life is on the line," Haney said.

"It's a very stressful time for him and he's hanging in there. We'll see which direction this takes."

Rinderknecht was not charged with any of the deaths caused by the fire, and evidence about the fatalities was excluded from the trial. The U.S.

Attorney's Office declined to comment on the mistrial or potential retrial. Criticism has been directed at the Los Angeles Fire Department for its response to the initial Lachman fire, but evidence regarding that response was not permitted in court.

The trial took place at the Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez U.S. Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, a separate trial related to the Eaton fire, which erupted the same day as the Palisades fire and killed 19 people while destroying over 10,000 structures in the San Gabriel Valley, is scheduled for January 2027. In that case, attorneys will seek to prove that faulty equipment owned by Southern California Edison sparked the fire that devastated Altadena.

A half-dozen recent warehouse fires across California demonstrate that these conflagrations can no longer be considered a rare malfunction. They are a predictable consequence of the industry's current trajectory, as a 2025 analysis by Zurich Insurance describes how storage trends labeled "too dense, too tall" have dramatically increased hazards.

Imagine a single roof covering one million square feet, stacked floor to ceiling with pallets of TVs, kayaks, electronics, batteries, hand sanitizer, vapes, toys, clothing, and suitcases, all wrapped in plastic. When a mega-warehouse burns, it is akin to an entire neighborhood going up in flames.

These massive structures, often exceeding one million square feet, are popular in part because they make the transition to automation more cost-effective. Automation facilitates top-to-bottom stacking while minimizing the need for human workers, but it also increases fuel density, creates larger areas for firefighters to cover, introduces more complex electrical systems, and places fewer eyes on the floor to spot early signs of trouble.

This combination has made modern warehouses a recipe for incendiary disaster. Big-box conflagrations require multi-agency collaboration, hundreds of firefighters, and days or even weeks to contain.

The recent cold-storage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights, which choked the air across Los Angeles, is a stark example. Fires can cause supply chain disruptions, financial losses in the millions, plumes of acrid smoke, soil and water contamination, and massive piles of toxic debris.

A 2020 fire in Redlands leveled a concrete tilt-up building the size of a city block and took a week to extinguish. That fire blanketed nearby neighborhoods with smoke, ash, and noxious fumes, leaving debris covering the equivalent of two football fields.

Post-fire cleanup led to a backroom deal to dump thousands of truckloads of rubble next to the San Bernardino neighborhood of Verdemont, where high winds dispersed concrete dust and dislodged pebbles that pelted windows, people, cars, and pets for years until the rubble was finally removed using thousands of truck trips. In December 2021, a three-alarm fire at the Carson Industrial Center was fueled by pallets of beauty products.

Toxins entering the Dominguez Channel caused a malodorous organic die-off, leading to headaches, sore throats, burning eyes, and nausea for months. After logging over 4,700 odor complaints, the region's air quality regulator issued five citations to the warehouse's complex chain of actors, including cosmetics brands, wholesalers, and Prologis, one of the largest warehouse companies in the world.

At the Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Ontario in April, a viral video allegedly showed an employee igniting some of the warehouse's one billion rolls of toilet paper, reportedly saying, "All you had to do was pay us enough to live." Warehouse fires also include higher rates of arson by exploited employees, who may set blazes, tamper with electrical systems, and disable mandatory sprinkler systems. The industry is heavily dependent on temp labor models with low wages, hostility toward collective bargaining, rapid employee turnover, and high rates of worker disability.

In recent days, the Lineage cold-storage warehouse in Boyle Heights burned for more than a week as the associated parties shifted responsibility. Global cold-storage food distributor Lineage Logistics leases the building from Chill Build, LLC, a joint venture of Barber Partners and Bain Capital.

Lineage in turn leases the roof to Los Palos Street Operating, LLC, a division of Altus Power, whose solar equipment may have malfunctioned during maintenance. Community members and residents city-wide impacted by toxic air from layers of insulated foam and plastics—and millions of pounds of burning or rotting frozen food—deserve to know who is responsible.

It is also important to understand how global capital underwrites local harm. Monumental buildings have monumental consequences.

Frontline community members have known this for years; now we are all getting a taste of it.

Federal authorities have arrested a Palmdale man accused of blackmailing teenage girls and coercing them into producing sexual images, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced Thursday. Kenneth Mellor, 20, of Palmdale, was taken into custody in Pennsylvania on Wednesday following an eight-month investigation.

The FBI said the investigation began in October 2025 after Mellor allegedly claimed to be in a relationship with a 12-year-old girl and forced her to create sexual content. After conducting a forensic review of digital devices seized from Mellor's home, investigators discovered that the suspect had communicated with numerous suspected victims.

According to the FBI, investigators have so far identified approximately 12 confirmed minor victims, with more than 10 additional victims yet to be identified. Mellor allegedly threatened, intimidated, and emotionally manipulated his young victims.

At least one of the minors may have attempted self-harm following Mellor's coercion. The complaint further alleges that Mellor frequently attempted to befriend and groom girls between the ages of 9 and 17 on various online platforms by misrepresenting his age.

He used multiple aliases on social media and gaming platforms, including Roblox, Discord, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and WePlay, to lure his victims. Authorities are asking the public to help identify additional victims.

Anyone with information is urged to contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit tips anonymously at tips.fbi.gov. The FBI warned parents and caregivers to remind children to be cautious when posting images online and to stress that images on the internet can exist forever.

They also advised that anything done via webcam or mobile device cameras can be recorded by a perpetrator without the victim's knowledge. If convicted on the charges, Mellor faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in federal prison and a statutory maximum of 30 years.

The online aliases used by Mellor include Angelicdvorapss, Dvoraps69, Angel1cT0nes, Daddytentoesdeep, Beachyboyken1, YT_reaper, Yttr.eaper, Dantekingofall, Dantedemonking, Dantedemonking2, Demonlorddante, Demonlorddantes, Itachi_godoffire, Tidesgamingsnipes, Mr_Faded, and ThelastKeshin.

The new article is about an entirely different case involving Ahang Mirshojae, Evan Hardman, and the murder of Hamid Mirshojae, with no connection to the Kenneth Earl Gay case. Therefore, it contains no new facts about the existing article.

The California Supreme Court has declined to review the case of Kenneth Earl Gay, a 68-year-old man serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the 1983 murder of Los Angeles Police Department Officer Paul Verna during a traffic stop in Lake View Terrace. The decision, announced Wednesday, marks a significant step toward finality in a case that has spanned more than four decades and multiple trials.

In an April 9 ruling, a three-justice panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal upheld Gay’s conviction, rejecting defense claims that jurors were improperly instructed and that a trial judge erred in denying three motions to dismiss. The defense did not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence supporting the conviction.

Gay was convicted in August 2023 of first-degree murder for the June 2, 1983, shooting death of Officer Paul Verna, a married father of two young sons who both later became police officers. Jurors found true special circumstance allegations of murder of a peace officer in the performance of his duties and murder to avoid or prevent a lawful arrest, but could not reach a unanimous verdict on the allegation that Gay personally used a gun during the crime.

The case has a long and tortuous history. Gay was originally convicted and sentenced to death in 1985, but the California Supreme Court overturned that conviction in 1998, finding he had not received constitutionally adequate representation.

A second death sentence in 2000 was also overturned in 2008, with the court ruling that the trial judge improperly barred Gay from presenting significant mitigating evidence. In 2020, the state Supreme Court sent the case back for a retrial of the guilt phase, again citing ineffective assistance of counsel.

During the retrial, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, under then-District Attorney George Gascón, opted not to seek the death penalty. However, Superior Court Judge Hayden Zacky rejected a bid by Gascón’s office to dismiss the special circumstance allegations, and in November 2023, sentenced Gay to life without parole.

Judge Zacky said the victim’s family had suffered “immeasurable” pain and expressed hope that the case would not be tried again, while acknowledging an appeal was likely.

Prosecutors argued that Gay and his accomplice, Raynard Cummings, had been engaged in a series of violent robberies in the San Fernando Valley when Officer Verna pulled them over. Cummings fired the first shot, prosecutors said, and then Gay emerged from the car, shot Verna three times in the back, and fired two more shots as the officer lay on the ground.

Cummings was also convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.

Defense attorney Monnica Thelen argued that Cummings was the sole shooter and that Gay had nothing to do with the murder. She called the case “severely lacking” and urged jurors not to let evidence of robberies inflame their passions.

At the sentencing hearing, the victim’s widow, Sandy Jackson, described the killing as an assassination and said her husband, a U.S. Air Force veteran and Medal of Valor recipient, is missed every day.

The officer’s sons, Ryan and Bryce Verna, both now retired LAPD officers, spoke of the devastation left by their father’s murder. Bryce Verna called it “repulsive” that Gay would not be executed, while Ryan noted he was only 4 years old when his father was “executed in cold blood.”

The California Supreme Court’s refusal to review the case brings the legal saga closer to an end, but the possibility of further appeals remains.

A Santa Monica employee was shot in the leg during an armed robbery at a local business on Wednesday evening, according to police reports. The incident occurred at a commercial establishment in the 2000 block of Lincoln Boulevard, where an unknown suspect entered the store, displayed a firearm, and demanded money.

During the confrontation, the suspect fired a single shot, striking the employee in the lower leg. The suspect fled the scene with an undisclosed amount of cash.

Police responded to reports of gunfire at approximately 7:30 p.m. and found the victim conscious and alert.

Paramedics provided emergency treatment on-site before transporting the employee to a nearby hospital. Hospital officials confirmed the victim is in stable condition and expected to recover.

The Santa Monica Police Department has launched an investigation, reviewing security footage and interviewing witnesses. Detectives believe the suspect acted alone and describe him as a male in his 20s, wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt and a mask.

Authorities are urging anyone with information to contact the Santa Monica Police Department's Robbery Unit. The business remains closed during the investigation.

This incident has raised concerns among local business owners and residents about safety in the area, which has seen a recent uptick in property crimes. Police have increased patrols in the neighborhood as a precaution.