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The affidavit provides a window into the firefighting timeline on Jan. 1, when just after midnight, the Lachman fire was ignited near a small clearing near the Temescal Ridge Trail.

When the suppression efforts were over, the affidavit said, the fire crews left fire hoses on site, in case they needed to be redeployed.

When he worked at a state forestry agency, he said, “we would have a lightning strike, and it would hit a tree, and it would burn for days, sometimes weeks, and then ignite into a forest fire. We would go suppress that, and then every day, for weeks on end, we would patrol those areas to make sure they didn’t reignite,” he said.

Peter Chang, 39, has lived in the same Sycamore Avenue apartment building in Hollywood for about four years and instantly recognized Rinderknecht when a Times reporter showed him a photo released by federal prosecutors.

It was not immediately clear when Rinderknecht moved to Southern California, but prosecutors said he at one point lived in the Palisades and was familiar with the area where the fire started.