In dramatic scenes involving a car chase and a citizens arrest, LA neighbours bandied together to pin a suspected arsonist down and restrain him with cable ties – as the city’s worst ever fires raged
Los Angeles neighbours made a daring citizens arrest when they spotted a man lurking around their street with a blowtorch as the catastrophic wildfires raged.
The men tackled down the suspected arsonist and restrained him with cable ties until the police arrived. Dad Peter Kay, 40, said “he would have done anything necessary to stop more fires spreading across Woodland Hills in LA.
Peter said he had first spotted the stranger holding a blowtorch as he rummaged near his bins on Thursday afternoon. Father-of-three Peter said: “The first thing that came to my mind is, I need to grab that from him, because this guy may not be mentally all there. He might do something unintentionally.”
The guy rode off on his bike, so Peter chased the suspect down in his car, while neighbour Ralph Cavallaro, 56, saw that the man had stopped outside his house and was rummaging in a wheelie bin that had an old Christmas tree, while holding something, the Telegraph reports.
Ralph said: “He sees me coming out of my house, gets back on the bike with the yellow blowtorch in his hand and was riding away, looking at me in the face.
Shortly after, Peter turned the corner in pursuit of the suspected arsonist, and asked Ralph where the guy had gone. Peter caught up to the man, pulling in front of him to block his escape path.
Peter said: “He was standing next to trash cans filled with brush and leaves and he started running … I started grabbing him but I didn’t want him to burn my face so I kept a distance and shouted at him to ‘put that down’, and he wasn’t willing to.”
Peter started shouting for help, saying someone was trying to set the neighbourhood on fire. His neighbours streamed out to find Peter in a standoff with the man.
As the suspect was distracted by one neighbour, Peter grabbed the man’s right arm, while another neighbour tripped the suspect over. Another resident grabbed cable ties from his garage and restrained him as they called 911 and waited.
The wildfires currently ablaze are the worst in the city’s history, killing 11 people and tearing through around 10,000 structures and wiping out whole communities.
While winds and dry conditions have exacerbated the situation, the cause of the original fires are still unconfirmed and many residents fear the fires have been started by arsonists.