So... I heard the call go out for the one starting on Laurel Cyn. on the last night. I knew by the address it was on the basin side, right there north of Sunset. I guess he did another one farther up in the hills after that, but I missed hearing that one. Next thing I know, about 15 minutes later, I hear fire engines and helicopters... He had come over through the canyon and done one right down the street from me. This started about 1 1/2 hour of total chaos, from about 1:45am on, where I think he did about 10 fires in something like 45 minutes in this area. I could see out onto the main street from above and I could see the smoke from the first one. One LAPD copter was joined by a second. I had seen the first fire trucks go by, then more after he went on to the second and third fires, less than a mile or so away from the first. But what was weird at the time, was that I kept thinking to myself... 'Wow, there's a lot of cars driving around for this time of night'. This is when it started to get surreal... One or groups of two LAPD patrols started continually racing up and down the street periodically, with their side spots on. They looked into all the corners between structures and stuff, and were also shining the spots into the cars of anybody they happen to come across. Then every once in a while they'd go flying off to someplace else, like they had gotten a call to try some other spot. I only kept the radio on fire, because I just wanted to hear where the fires were. After a while, I started thinking I was crazy, because I kept thinking the civilian cars I saw driving by were the same cars. Then about 8 cars all sort of pulled together at the corner, like they were all talking. Then it dawned on me... They were all undercover cars. The next fire went off just to the north on the radio, and all those cars instantly went flying up the street that way in a row. Then about 6 more came out from other streets and went speeding off behind the first group. I'm not going to describe the vehicles, because I don't know if they are part of the PD's fleet or not... But many of them were very creative. You would never guess what they were. I believe guys in a couple looked to have turnouts on.
So the fires kept going, and I could watch the copters move from one spot to the next as they went off. The whole thing was very bizarre. Periodically the patrols kept coming around, and also a few of the regular cars would slowly cruise through, which looked to be more undercovers that sort of lagged behind, trying to get lucky. One in particular looked sort of like one of the cars they had mentioned as being a potential suspect car a few days earlier, and I actually started to get worried, because I thought... OK, if this guy is the actual guy and lights a fire, I'm going to feel really stupid. But the new fires started going off to the west. While all that was happening, you could pretty much constantly hear the sirens from the fire trucks off in the distance through the whole thing. Eventually it calmed down and then I started hearing the LASD talking about a perimeter back over in WeHo, and that turned out to be them catching him. I think it was just a basic traffic stop, after all that.
But how this guy evaded so many people and aircraft for so long, I have no idea. He definitely has some major ninja skills.
