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CABAZON, Calif. – “Two severe burn injuries and three firefighters currently lost and unaccounted for.”
Police and fire scanners crackled to life in the early morning hours of Oct. 26, 2006.
“For the burn victims being brought out are they being brought out by engine or civilian vehicles?"
"We don’t know we haven’t found them yet.”
At first, the calm chatter across the radio masked the severity of the situation.
“They’re now requesting a total of four ambulances.”
Five U.S. Forest Service firefighters lay dead or dying atop a charred hill west of Palm Springs in an area of Southern California’s San Jacinto Mountains, known locally as “Arson Alley.”
Gloria Ayala was at work when she learned a major fire was raging across the nearby mountains. Although her 20-year-old son was a wildland firefighter, Ayala believed he was out of harm’s way.
But everything changed when she got a call from a friend’s mother saying her son’s truck went down. Shortly after coworkers rushed her home, there was a knock at the door.
“It was two gentlemen in U.S. Forestry uniforms,” she said. “They said, ‘We regret to tell you that your son, Daniel Najera, was one of the casualties.’ And I completely broke down.”
It was the visit Ayala always dreaded. Her son, alongside the four other men of Engine Company 57, was killed protecting a vacant home dubbed the “Octagon House.”
Najera’s body was found near the destroyed home he was trying to defend. Jess McLean and Jason McKay died next to their fire engine. Two more firefighters, Capt. Mark Loutzenhiser and Pablo Cerda, survived the incident but later died from their injuries.
Nearly nine years later, Ayala still makes the trek along the narrow and rocky Wonderview Road, retracing the path of Engine 57 that fateful day. Today, a roadside memorial stands near the base of the driveway leading to the "Octagon" in honor of the five firefighters. Five white crosses made of rebar mark the locations where each firefighter had fallen.
“Danny was an amazing son. He loved his work,” said Ayala, fighting back tears. “Danny died, yes, but he also lived.”
The fatal Esperanza Fire that scorched more than 40,000 acres of land and destroyed 34 homes was no freak accident – it was set intentionally.
Between 2007 and 2011, local fire departments in the U.S. responded to an estimated average of 334,200 brush, grass and forest fires per year, according to the National Fire Protection Association. That translates to about 915 fires reported daily, with 1 in 5 being intentionally set.
California’s Banning Pass sits between two mountain ranges and has become notorious for attracting arsonists.
“The landscape is an invitation to set fire,” said John Maclean, journalist and author of “The Esperanza Fire.” “It is a natural fire ground.”
Maclean estimates 10 percent of the fires that start in California are of human origin and are malignant.
“It’s an awful lot,” he said. “The phenomenon of serial arsonists is a very real one. A lot of these guys will not just set one or two fires to give themselves a thrill. They may set hundreds – even thousands – of fires.”
Although the FBI has a standard profile for an arsonist that helps get an investigation started, Maclean said, but finding and bringing an arsonist to justice is tough work.
“It's a very, very difficult crime to prove,” he said. “It is in fact the second-most-difficult of all crimes to prove, behind only sexual abuse.”
Maclean says arsonists are also tend to be cowards.
“This is not a crime where they face their victim, shoot them, beat them over their heads, steal their wallet, whatever,” Maclean said. “They set a little fire, then they run away. And by the time the fire takes off and bad things happen, they're miles and miles from the scene.”
Detectives in Riverside, California arrested the man behind the Esperanza Fire, serial arsonist Raymond Lee Oyler, six days after he tossed the fire starter into the tinder-dry, windblown hillside. Officials believe he set more than 1,000 fires before he was caught. He was sentenced to death in 2009.
Retired arson investigator Doug Allen tracked down arsonists for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the state’s firefighting agency, for three decades. He knows how painstaking the work is, and said every fire has its own story.
“It leaves its imprint on the ground. It leaves its history from the time of first ignition, from its incipient stage all the way to the end of the fire,” Allen said. “[Investigators] are reading the small indicators of how this fire moved from the point of origin.”
After a meticulous search, arson investigators discovered the ignition device used to set the Esperanza Fire: a cigarette and matches secured by a rubber band.
“My heart sank thinking that somebody could intentionally kill someone else,” Ayala said. “That's a sickness, that's definitely a sickness.”
Serial arsonists are sometimes hidden among the ranks of the firefighting community, Maclean says. The most famous case, he said, is John Orr – the former Glendale, California, fire captain and arson investigator – who is currently serving a life sentence for setting a deadly fire in 1990.
“It's not all that unusual unfortunately,” Maclean said. “There's a stereotype of a firefighter arsonist and it is based on some reality.”
That reality is not lost on arson investigators.
“The standard operating procedure is to look at the firefighters,” Allen said. “The state and federal agencies wanted to eliminate their own people first.”
What’s equally alarming is the number of serial arsonists living in just this region alone. There could easily be a dozen people committing serial arson, Allen says.
“I don't think the public realizes that there are that many serious arsonists out there bent on setting fires and burning our wildland areas,” he said.
Ayala now speaks out to raise awareness about arson. The loss of her son Daniel is always with her.
“That gave me a pit in my stomach. Just thinking that there are that many arsonists in the area here,” she said. “The first thing I think of is just the families, the loss of the human being, and because it's somebody else doing it, just as if somebody went and shot somebody with a gun, it's the same loss. A loss is a loss.”
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