Rather than banging the defendant in the Justin Halstenberg arson prosecution, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office opted to end the case it put on against him with the whimper of one of his alleged victims.
Brooke Palenchar, who lived with her family and ten children in a home in Running Springs until September 8, 2024, tearfully recounted how her family had to hurriedly gather up their most precious heirlooms and make an exodus down from the San Bernardino Mountain community they called home for nearly 20 years as the fourth most destructive fire in San Bernardino County history was rapidly advancing on their neighborhood. She and her family came through the ordeal intact, she testified, but the house and all of the possessions in it that were left behind were lost, as the home, which was actually owned by her mother, burned to the ground. The only item remaining, she said, was the chimney, which was visible amidst the charred rubble in a photo that Deputy District Attorney Andrew Peppler projected onto the courtroom’s three visual display screens as part of an effort to leave an indelible image in each juror’s optic cortex .
That photo was contrasted with one showing the resplendent mountain home from a similar angle while it was still standing and another of the view from the house’s backyard at night and the majestic panorama of the colorfully lit San Bernardino Valley in the background.
Palenchar was the 27th and last witnessed called by the prosecution. Her telling of what had happened to her and her family, the pain of their loss, was intended by Peppler and Deputy District Attorney Justin Crocker as the crowning illustration of the destruction they say was wrought by Halstenberg.
The Palenchar home was one of several structures overrun by what the prosecution teams alleges was the third fire Halstenberg ignited in Highland on September 5. The first two of those fires, prosecutors maintain, were snuffed out when an alert nearby resident alerted firefighter to the first one and they arrived in time to douse it completely and a passerby acted quickly when he spotted a burning tumbleweed by the side of the road which he stomped out. Halstenberg, prosecutors say, touched those fires off by fashioning crude but effective ignition devices consisting of a sheet of paper wrapped and then twisted around pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters which he lit and then tossed out of the window of his moving pickup truck into the extremely dry vegetation by the side of the road. The third of these fires, prosecutors say, spread through a field beside Baseline Road, reached a slope and then rapidly advanced up the hillside, growing to a size and intensity responding firefighters were unable to control. That fire expanded upward and in an east-northeast direction for more than a month through the communities of East Highland Ranch and Running Springs, as well as approaching and threatening or partially entering into Green Valley Lake, Cedar Glen, Lake Arrowhead, Crestline, Valley of Enchantment, Arrowbear Lake, Big Bear Valley, Angelus Oaks, Seven Oaks, Forest Falls, and Mountain Home Village, stabilizing by October 23 but yet comprising hot spots that were not fully eradicated, charring 43,978 acres in total by the time it reached 100 percent containment after 110 days on December 23, 2024.