The trial of Jason Halstenberg began in earnest this week, with the prosecution wasting no time in laying the foundation for and then constructing the first stories in a high rise of circumstantial evidence to prove that he was the instigator of the Line Fire, the fourth most destructive wildland conflagration in San Bernardino County history.
As boldly, Halstenberg’s two defense lawyers at the earliest opportunity undertook to eat away at the edifice of evidence being erected against their client, moving rapidly to deconstruct the assumptions upon which the theory of Halstenberg’s guilt is based and to deride the flimsiness of certain items of evidence gathered by the investigators, who were looking into suspicions of arson-associated activity in the area around the area of the Line Fire’s origin even before that fire was set and within the first hour of the blaze, just as it was growing beyond the possibility of early containment.
Established during the first three days of testimony, eight witnesses were called, including two arson investigators employed by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Those investigators indicated they are absolutely convinced the Line Fire was the product of an arsonist who at least twice previously on September 5, the day the inferno began, used a distinctive ignition device to set the fires, one so rare that the lead arson investigator on the case testified he had not encountered such an implement in more than 500 fires he had previously worked on. The individual responsible had thus left what was tantamount to his calling card at the scene of Line fire’s origin, prosecutors through those investigators and one of the witnesses suggested.
Using the testimony of others who took the stand this week and submitted to questions regarding their own observations and/or footage caught on security videos installed at their homes or on their vehicles, the prosecution as testimony wrapped up this week had begun to lay out but had not quite cinched up its argument that Heustenberg and his equally distinctive dual cab, white short bed Chevrolet pickup truck was present in Highland, in close proximity to all three of the fires that had been set in the crucial time frame prior to and during the fires being lit, and that he is thus unmistakably identifiable as the firebug.
The defense team fought to keep pace, suggesting that the evidence being presented by the prosecution as damning of Halstenberg, while no doubt consisting of artifacts found at the scene of the three lit fires, was in multiple respects too fragmentary to paint a reliable snapshot of actual events. Furthermore, the defense contended, the state’s expert witness consisting of the arson investigators had not gathered evidence and then evaluated and analyzed it non-prejudiciously in accordance with scientific method to reach a determination a posteriori but had formed a conclusion a priori and then selectively focused on certain artifacts remaining in the wake of the fire to support a finding of Halstenberg’s guilt while discounting or ignoring evidence that pointed to some other factors unrelated to the defendant having sparked the blaze. The investigators, the defense sought to suggest to the jury, had postulated the existence of an ignition device they had never seen, of which no intact example exists and which they had not bothered to recreate, to offer up speculation that Halstenberg had used it to touch off the fire.
Read the full article in this week’s edition of the Sentinel, available at newsstands throughout San Bernardino County.