California fires: Sheriff rips conservative media on crazy arrest rumor
Conservative media sites on Tuesday attempted to link the Sunday arrest of a Latino man on suspicion of arson in Sonoma to the massive, deadly cluster of wildfires burning in California’s wine country.
But Breitbart News and InfoWars offered no evidence to link the man’s arrest to the fires and their accounts of the man’s arrest were disputed the same day by Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano.
“There’s a story out there he’s the arsonist for these fires. That is not the case. There is no indication he is related to these fires at all,” Giordano said in a news conference also broadcast on the department’s Facebook page and area TV stations. “I just did want to kill that speculation right now so we didn’t have things running too far out of control.”
Both sites published the story of the man, Jesus Fabian Gonzalez, who was arrested on Sunday on suspicion of arson in Sonoma, southeast of Santa Rosa. The websites cite a Santa Rosa Press Democrat report, though the paper doesn’t connect the arrest to the larger fires, which broke out Oct. 8 in Napa and Sonoma counties and have so far killed dozens and destroyed thousands of homes.
A public information officer for the Sheriff’s Office was not immediately available for comment Tuesday afternoon.
The Press Democrat reported Gonzalez was walking out of creek area with a plume of smoke behind him in the Maxwell Farms Regional Park in Sonoma.
Three Sonoma County Probation Officers patrolling the area because of the larger fires spotted Gonzalez, who told them he’d started the fire because he was cold, Sonoma County Sheriff’s Sgt. Spencer Crum told the Press Democrat.
The fire was extinguished before it got out of control, the paper reported.
Crum said the only questions Breitbart News and InfoWars asked were about Gonzalez’s ethnicity and whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement had placed a detainer on him, which would hold him for an additional 48 hours at the jail.
Crum said there is a detainer request on Gonzalez, but the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office would not be complying with it.
California county jails comply with the TRUST Act, which went into effect in 2014, and prevents them from holding individuals solely based on their immigration status. Gonzalez has not had a felony or misdemeanor conviction in the past five years, Crum said, but would instead be headed to Ventura County where he has a warrant out for his arrest.
Gonzalez is being held in the Sonoma County Jail in lieu of $100,000 bail, according to an online jail roster.
“Our arson case involves someone who’s known to the deputies, he frequents Maxwell Park. He’s been known to sleep there,” Giordano said. “He was walking away from — we have extra security patrols out there — he was walking away from a small fire. They stopped him. He had a fire extinguisher and a lighter with him. They asked him if he started the fire and he said he started the fire to warm himself up, something to that effect.”
Crum said they haven’t had to debunk any additional rumors about the wildfires and this was the “first really crazy one” they had come across.
The cause of the fires remains under investigation, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Source:- https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/10/17/california-fires-sheriff-rips-conservative-media-crazy-arrest-rumor/774572001/
