See where the incident unfolded
Firefighters responded to the brush fire on northern Idaho’s Canfield Mountain Sunday, before the situation turned deadly.
Why do arsonists set fires?
There’s no such thing as a typical arsonist. People commit arson for different reasons, Ed Nordskog, an arson investigator with the LA County Sheriff’s Department, previously told CNN.
Psychologists point to some common characteristics: problems communicating, impulsive behaviors, difficulty expressing emotions and an interest in fire paraphernalia.
Roughly 20% of human-caused wildland fires in the US are set deliberately, but motives can vary widely. For some, it’s a means to an end. These are usually the one-and-done arsonists, Nordskog said. It’s the person who burns their car because they want the insurance money, or the business owner who sets fire to their office to destroy paperwork.
In urban areas, arson occurs every day for a variety of reasons, Nordskog said, citing dumpster fires, car fires and people burning garbage in alleys. Many unhoused people accidentally set fires while cooking or trying to keep warm, he said. Mental health and substance use issues can also contribute to the cause of these fires, he noted.
Serial wildland arsonists are rare, but they’re “the worst of the worst,” Nordskog said.
They tend to plan the event and take steps not to get caught, such as turning off their cellphones and using time-delayed incendiary devices, giving them time to get away.
Regardless of why an arsonist starts a fire, they have no control over how big it gets. As climate change creates increasingly dangerous fire conditions, arsonists hold the power to do a lot more damage, experts say.
Investigators likely working to understand suspect’s motive, former intelligence official says
Investigators are likely working to understand the motivation of the Idaho suspect who they believe started a brush fire before shooting at responding firefighters in what authorities describe as a planned ambush, a former intelligence official told CNN.
First, investigators will be looking at “whether or not there was some sort of tension; some sort of strife, conflict between local law enforcement and this individual,” Turner said.
Then, they will likely look into the whether the suspect held broader world views – such as anti-law enforcement or anti-government leanings – that drove him to launch the attack.
The ambush appears to have been “a fairly complex attack where he intended to harm more people than he did,” Turner said.
Turner, who said he spent 21 years in the Marine Corps, said he could hear the stress in the firefighters’ voices, recorded in audio of the incident.
“I listened to that, and I could hear in their voices the kind of tension that I would hear under very stressful situations in the military,” he said.
