The Long Dangerous, Twisted Journey Of The Alleged Arsonist Of The Destructive Spokane Wildfires

Devastating scene in Spokane, Washington 
after the fires. An arsonist set the fire. The
alleged suspect has quite a history of 
crime, arson and mental illness. 

 Aaron Farinacci, the man arrested and charged with the worst of the devastating Spokane wildfires, allegedly has a history of setting fires around the city.  This one just happened to be by far the worst. 

The more information that comes out, the more court hearings we have, the more we learn that Farinacci appears to be a dangerous and deeply troubled man. 

He is charged with setting the largest and most destructive wildfire in Spokane. But court records indicate he has a history of setting fires. He giant Spokane fire was just by far the worst one he set. I  

The AP paints a vivid picture of how the horrible wildfire began: 

"On Saturday, Paul Child, 64, was driving with his grandson along some railroad tracks in his rural neighborhood northwest of Spokane. He saw a man standing and looking toward nearby trees. About 10 minutes later, as they were returning home, the man was still there.

'He was bent over in the brush, acting nervous,' Child told the Associated Press on Tuesday, 'You get the feeling this guy's up to something.'

"No longer than 10 minutes after I got home, my daughter says, 'There's a fire,'" Child called. My first words were 'That SOB started a fire!," it was the exact spot where he was standing.'"

As noted in a previous blog post,  a responding sheriff's deputies found the man matching the description Child offered walking more than a mile away from the fire's ignition point. Child arrived and basically said, "That's the guy."

Farinacci was wearing a green t-shirt that read, 'Who needs luck I have charm,"  In his backpack and fanny pack, he had cigarettes, waterproof matches and a butane lighter. 

He told deputies when he was arrested he didn't set the fire and was not anywhere near where the blaze started. The deputies were unaware of Farinacci's past suspicious activity with fires, and they were busy coordinating evacuations, so they let him go.

By Monday, August 3, investigators knew the fire was deliberately set, and the arrest was made. 

Farinacci haas quite a history anyway.  He served about a decade in prison for killing his father 16 years ago in Arizona. He was 21 years old at the time, and the shooting stemmed from an argument with his father over doing the dishes.  

 As KREM reports, Farninacci shot his father once in the face as he entered his room, the again in the back as the father turned to leave. He later died at a hospital.

Farinacci ran from the house and shot himself in the chest with the same gun he used on his father.  Farinacci later told police the shooting was an accident and told them he "deserved to be sentenced to prison as he took someone's life."

KREM continues: "He was convicted of manslaughter and aggravated assault in 2012. He was released from prison in 2020, and records show that he was discharged from probation in 2024 while living with a girlfriend in Washington State."  

Farinacci, 37, is suspected of setting several fires, each of which only covered areas about the size of buses. Another fire last August that he might have started blazed through a state park prompting evacuations, though no houses burned, according to the Associated Press.

During a court hearing Thursday, Angust 6, Judge Jeremy Schmidt found probable cause to charge Farinacci with four additional counts of arson for fires the suspect told a detective he's set since last summer. 

If detectives, prosecutors and court papers are accurate, Farinacci is a scary dude with potentially serious mental issues. Even if you don't include the time he shot his father

As KREM reports: "He told detectives his son was born in May, 2025 and he was 'having trouble dealing with life issues.'  A detective who interviews Farinacci wrote, "He feels fire is powerful, beautiful, and that things that go through fire experience a kind of rebirth."

Detectives said Farinacci admitted to starting 25 fires since last July. He's only been charged with four of them because detectives couldn't corroborate that information. One of the fires he's suspected of starting was on in July, 2025 which burned more than 1,200 and threatened some homes.

Investigators said Farinacci that "'Who needs luck I have charm" t-shirt when he set a fire on August 11, 2025.

Six days before the big conflagration, on July 24, Farinacci said what he started what is known as the Indian Bluff Fire, which ultimately harmed no homes. 

By July 31 Spokane and the rest of eastern Washington was under a particularly dangerous red flag warning, meaning the risk of wildfires the next day would be extremely 

Farinacci was paying attention to the weather forecasts. He'd waited at least a couple weeks for a day with high winds, hot temperatures and low humidity. He also said he researched other arsonists and ways to create time delay devices for setting wildfires, KREM reported.

If that's true, he weaponized weather warnings meant to protect the public. This raises another issue. There's absolutely no evidence Farinacci was involved in weather betting.

On-line prediction markets like Polymarket allow people to bet on the outcome events, like elections, sports and other occurrences. 

"It's not just easy to start a fire - now there's a potential financial incentive," said Kaitlyn Trudeau,  a California-based climate scientist with Climate Central. 

For example, as High Country News points out Polymarket list nearly 20 questions to be on during the January 2025 Los Angeles area wildfire calamity.  

The questions included "How many acres will the Palisades Fire burn by Friday? Will the Palisades Fire reach Santa Monica by Sunday? When will the Palisads fire be 50% contained?"

You can see the logical next betting question is, "How big will the next wildfire get during the next red flag warning." And you can see how somebody might start a fire so they can win big with the online gambling. 

In any event, on that dry, windy August 1, the alleged arsonist said the picked the spot where he set the big fire because he knew it would be bad, though he didn't intend for the blaze to get as big as it did. He placed a time delay device in the dry grass.

Those hundreds of Spokane area homes were now doomed. Residents will be picking up the pieces for a long time. 

The Associated Press said that the other two major fires around Spokane on August 1 were started by humans, but officials didn't say whether the fires were intentional or accidental.  

Meanwhile, while most other fires across the West were started by lightning or human accidents, some are being investigated as arson. One horrible very mentally ill people can wreck the lives of so many others. 

Spokane Becomes The Latest City Victimized By Climate Fires. More Surely To Come, Unfortunately

A woman rushes her dog away as her house burns down
Saturday during the Spokane wildfire. She reported lost
other pets in the blaze,

Spokane, Washington has joined the sad list of American towns and cities mowed down by marauding wildfires in recent years. 

Fort McMurray, Alberta in 2016. Gatlinburg, Tennessee, also in 2016. Paradise, California in 2018. Lytton, British Columbia in 2021, the Boulder, Colorado area, also in 2021. Lahaina, Hawaii, 2023. Pacific Palisades and Altadena, California in 2025.

It's been quite a decade for fires blasting through North American towns and cities. The above is only the highlight. Numerous other smaller towns have lost many of their homes and businesses in other fires

Now, it's Spokane.

In just an afternoon and evening on August 1, more than 600 homes burned down in and around Spokane. Once again, we saw the horrible scenes of hasty evacuations, roads clogged with cars with panicked, fleeing families inside. 

History has other big fires smashing through towns of course. A wildfire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin that killed perhaps 2,000 people. 

An 1881 fire in Michigan killed 282 people.  An 1894 Minnesota wildfire killed more than 400 people. And in 1910 the so-called Great Fire swept through five million acres in Idaho, Montana and Washington. 

These urban firestorms seemed to calm down in much of the 20th century. Sure there were a few, like the Oakland-Berkeley  Hills firestorm in 1991, which killed 25 people. But too many of us assumed we had conquered the threat of a wildfire plowing into a town or a city

But now they're back. Especially over the past decade, as we noted.

WILDLAND-URBAN INTERFACE

One problem is the wildland-urban interface. More and more people are moving into woodsy areas as suburbs expand into once unpopulated areas. The appeal is obvious: A beautiful forest in your backyard, wildlife wandering by. It's hard to resist. 

The wildland-urban interfaces or WUI's, are not just in the western states. The states with the most houses in WUIs are California, Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

There's always talk of adaption in these zones, to keep the house from burning.  Clear the brush and the trees away from the houses. Clean the gutters. That kind of thing. But judging from the way the ravaged neighborhoods in Spokane appeared.you can't fully adapt yourself out of extreme wildfires. 

The neighborhoods that burned were typical suburbia. Nice lawns, flower beds. Scattered decorative trees. The flammable pines and spruces safe in the background. Or so you'd think. 

Under normal circumstances, when a single house goes up in flames, due to an electrical problem, clumsy kitchen cooking, an unattended candle, a small army of firefighters arrive. Neighboring houses get soaked down so they don't burn, too. 

In wildfires, there's never enough personnel to protect every home. The entire forest behind the neighborhoods is on fire. Embers are everywhere, setting fire to the old leaves in the gutters, sneaking into the attic vents, setting the area beneath the roof on fire. The pretty decorative cedar against the foundation - dried out by months of drought - bursts into flames amid the sparks. That blaze quickly sets the house on fire.

On and on the fires go, hopscotching from one house to the next. In the end, in Spokane, at least 700 houses succumbed. That's how it works in the wild land-urban interface.

DRY WEATHER/CLIMATE CHANGE

We knew there would be trouble in eastern Washington on Saturday. It's been building since this past winter. Unprecedented warmth and a lack of snow meant the landscape dried out much earlier in the spring than it usually does. 

It doesn't rain much during the summer in eastern Washington. Normally June precipitation is 1.17 inches in Spokane. This year, Spokane received just 0.26 inches. The city usually gets just under a half inch of rain in July. This year, there was only a trace.

The area is absolutely arid at this point. This weekend a dry cold front passed through the region. West winds with the cold front gained momentum as they raced down the east slopes of the Cascade mountains, drying out as they did so, 

The smallest sparks erupted in to firestorms on Saturday, and the disaster landed.  

By Sunday, 920 firefighters were battling the blazes in and around Spokane. That number was expected to rise to 2,000 during this week. More than 65,000 people had been evacuated, with no word yet on when all of them will go home. 

The weather forecast across the Pacific Northwest is discouraging. The wind has diminished, but it will remain dry and hot for the foreseeable future. Winds are expected to increase this coming weekend, but they won't be as strong as they were last Saturday. 

 It's no coincidence that these urban and suburban wildfires have increased over the past decade. It's not just the wildland-urban interface.  Spokane is a great, sad example. Climate change helped make the winter warmer, the summer drier. You see it over and over again. Paradise, California hit because the winter rains were late. Same thing happened in Altadena in 2025. 

Climate change has made things so much more extreme. So much more predictable. And this summer, the extreme weather continues, given an added boost by a wildly strong El Nino.

The fires near Spokane, in the rest of Washington State and the West overall will burn indefinitely. Probably until the winter snows fly. 

LOUSY CONDITIONS/LOUSY PEOPLE

Spokane wasn't the only wildfire problem. As of Sunday, seventeen major fires encompassing 260,000 were burning across Washington. In Oregon, wildfires have burned more than 2 million acres, by far the most acreage on record. August and September tend to be the peak fire season in Oregon. 

The record for an entire fire season - set in 2024 - is about the same as what has burned so far this year in Oregon

On Saturday, the wind and the dry air around Spokane and other areas of the Northwest made fighting the fires impossible. They basically morauded unimpeded through forests, scrublands and finally neighborhoods, 

 "There is not a fire department in the United States that can handle a wind-driven event this size," said Assistant Spokane Fire Chief Lance Dahl. 

The spikes in wind over the next couple of months will likely lead to more homes burned this year. Maybe not hundreds at a time like in Spokane but enough to hurt many, many more families. 

The end result of this conflagration in Spokane was so many moments of normal daily life cruelly interrupted. Per the Spokane Spokesman-Review:

"Signs of children lingered on sidewalks where hopscotch was chalked. Stone stairs that once led to a wraparound porch led to nothing Smoldering foundations were still hot enough to melt shoes."

At one, the homeowner found nothing salvageable except for a muffin tin. At another house, it was complete devastation except for a koi pond. The fish in the pond somehow survived. At yet another destroyed home, a father instructed his son to take a brick from the house as a memento. He'd already done that. 

The most infuriating thing about the Spokane disaster is its apparent cause - arson. On Monday, Aaron Farinacci, 37, was arrested in Spokane for allegedly starting the Old Trails Fire, the largest and most destructive of three large fires in and around the city.  

As NBC News reports, the fire began at around 10 a.m. Saturday A witness told police the saw the man looking into the trees an was later seen crouching at the side of the road near some grass before he "stood up and looked very nervous" and walked away, said Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels .

Police detained Farinacci Saturday about a half mile from where the fire started. He had waterproof matches and a butane lighter on him. Authorities let Farinacci go, apparently mostly because the most important job at the moment was understandably evacuating people hastily. 

On Sunday, investigators determined the Old Trail Fire started exactly where the witness saw Farinacci crouching, leading to Monday's arrest. At last check he's being held on $1 million bond.

So far, I haven't seen a motive for the arson. 

Farinacci is (allegedly!) the worst but not only horrible idiot associated with the fires. We saw at least 26 incidents of people flying personal drones over the fires. That mean officials had to ground air support for safety reasons, hurting the firefighting efforts. 

By the way, flying drones over an emergency zone is a federal crime. 

In Oregon, the Jefferson County Sheriff's office are warning boaters on Lake Billy Chinook could be completely shut down for recreation if people don't stop interfering with firefighting efforts. Onlookers have repeatedly gotten too close to planes and helicopters as they scoop water from the lake to fight nearby fires, Central Oregon Daily News reported.  

Goons are watching the fires, for afar, too, coldly trying to make money off the blazes. These days you can bet on anything. 

Prediction marketshare allowing people to place bets on wildfires. 

According to OregonLive:

"In a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates prediction markets, Sens. Ron Widen and Jeff Merkley joined lawmakers from other wildfire-stricken states in urging the agency to crack down on wildfire-related contracts. The group warned the markets could create financial incentives for arsons and criticized what they described as profiteering from disasters affecting vulnerable communities."

Reportedly, the 2025 Los Angeles fires prompted more than $1 million in wagers. Since then the betting market has grown exponentially. 

THE REST OF US

As is always the case with these big wildfires, it becomes everybody's problem. Thick smoke is billowing across the Pacific Northwest, set to create intense air pollution in cities like Portland, Eugene, Vancouver and Seattle.

 The smoke, combined with smoke from dozens of other western wildfires is drifting across the nation. Virtually everyone across the continental U.S. is either experiencing occasionally hazy skies and smoke, or will soon.

So, our lungs will once again suffer the consequences. 

As we've already noted, these huge wildland-urban interface wildfires have become disconcertingly common. Pretty much every year now. The droughts, the heat, the weird extremes brought on by climate change continue to take their toll.

Sadly, there's plenty of time for another Spokane this summer and fall.  There are so many towns and cities in California, Oregon, Washington and other western states that are sitting ducks for these kind of extreme wildfires 

Climate change won't stop anytime soon. It's another new normal in our abruptly hotter world. Some parts of the world are taking serious steps to combat climate change. The United States meanwhile, remains completely unserious about the problem.  

The money from the fossil fuel industry is too tempting for our so-called leaders. Too many Americans are willfully ignorant, as they prattle on about chemtrails and conspiracies and shrill references to an irrelevant hot spell in the 1930s. 

Nobody deserves to have their home burn down in a wildfire of course. Including those who say climate change is a hoax. But unfortunately, these firestorms will continue. Denial or not.  

QAnon Quebec Man Started Some Of Those Awful Wildfires Last Summer For Bizarre Reasons

Conspiracy theorist Brian Parè pleaded guilty to arson
charges. He set some of last June's wildfires in Quebec
to "prove" some sort of nefarious government plan
that he made up. 

 I'm sure you remember choking on wildfire smoke blowing down from Canada last spring and summer. 

I can now blame one particular nut job person for a little bit of that pollution that hazed out Vermont skies last June.

Meet Brian Parè, 38, who prosecutors said on May 31 and June 1  started 14 fires near Chapais, Quebec. about 260 miles northwest of Quebec City.

On those two days, hundreds of fires broke out across much of Quebec. An intense drought was ongoing. 

Most of the fires were sparked by lightning, and those strikes ignited the dry, vast forests of the region. The result was choking smoke blowing southward into New England. 

For reasons only Parè fully understands, he decided to augment the lightning and start his own fires. Two of the fires Parè set force the evacuation of about 500 homes around the town of Chapais.

As seems to be always the case, Parè is a QAnon nutcase. These are the people who were convinced Hillary Clinton and probably Tom Hanks were running a child sex trafficking ring out of the non-existent basement of a Washington DC pizza shop.

Anyway, Parè claimed on Facebook that the fires were deliberately set by the government to trick people into believing in climate change, CBC reported.

It's unclear why Parè started the fires when he believed the government was already doing so. 

Antihate.ca delved into Parè's social media posts and hoo-boy! 

Here's some examples, notes Antihate.ca: 

"'Our government and elite want it to burn," Parè wrote in a June 26 Facebook post, translated from French by Google. 'Not complicated. Since 2020, we are in a conspiracy of the new world order of 2030.'"

I'm not sure what Parè thinks is the new world order, but oh, wll.

Apparently, according to Perè, the Quebec drought that helped create the wildfires was not the work of climate change or random weather patterns. He explained: "It's NASA who controls the weather and our famous elites."

Parè also thinks that chemtrails are a thing, and he's also into a newer wacko idea called the 15-minute city.

To review, high-flying jets often create a narrow band of cirrus clouds behind them. Hot exhaust condenses into the cold air these aircraft fly through, forming the clouds. The wackos think these are "chemtrails," in which the government is seeding us with stuff to control our minds, or sterilize us for some reason or make us afraid, or........something like that, I guess.  

Haze from Quebec wildfires as seen at St. Albans Bay,
Vermont on June 5, 2023. A Quebec conspiracy
theorist set some of the fires, it turns out. 

The 15-minute city is a real concept, but not in the way that conspiracy nuts would have you believe. Fifteen minute city is an idea in which all urban amenities should be available within a 15 minute walk or bike ride. 

The weirdos like Parè think it's somehow a global plot to allow governments to control their population. 

I'm not sure how the convenience of reaching a subway or a bus stop within 15 minutes controls people like me, but I guess I think differently than these special people.   

 Pare has pleaded guilty to 13 counts of arson and one count of arson with disregard for human life, according to CBC.  He also tried to claim he set the fires to test whether the forests were dry or not. I guess he didn't think to dig into the soil a bit to see whether he came up with dust or mud, I don't know.

You know, I'm annoyed at Parè for setting those fires. And I've been bullying him pretty brutally here. But in a sense I feel for the guy.  I'm far more enraged at the proponents of these conspiracy theories who prey on the gullible, like Parè. 

Because those proponents aren't trying to help people like Parè. They're just trying to enrich themselves, leaving people like Parè as collateral damage that they don't care a whit about.  

I'm not convinced most of the people who promote all this QAnon conspiracy nonsense actually believe any of it. But there's money to be made by this, so they spread this garbage. 

Which becomes dangerous. What if one of the fires Perè set killed someone? But they don't care. Grifters gotta grift, right?