Inside the Minds of Arsonists

Watching as fire torched dry brush and threatened expensive homes near Escondido, Steve Robles felt exhilarated and scared.

The 21-year-old had arrived on the scene before fire crews, looking like any other firefighter in a heavy coat, boots and goggles. He immediately began knocking on doors, warning homeowners of the looming danger.

But the fire grew and soon Robles was trapped. Flames charged down a hill toward him, swallowing sunbaked weeds, backyard sheds and anything else that would burn, including at least one house.

Then, miraculously, just as the flames bore down on Robles and a firefighter who had arrived with a hose, the winds shifted. One home was lost, but the men saved two others. For the moment, Robles was the firefighting hero he always wanted to be.

But the truth was far different. Less than a month later, he was arrested on suspicion of arson while driving away from another wildfire in his white Ford Bronco with “FIRE” stenciled in red on front and back. The vehicle’s lights were rigged to flash like an emergency vehicle’s. But Robles was not a firefighter.

Eventually, Robles would confess to setting the Escondido fire and six others in the same area that summer in 1997, using a method he picked up from a reality television show called “L.A. Firefighters.” The blazes torched hills and horse farms east of San Diego and turned 13 homes to ash.

Five years later, as Robles sits in a prison cell serving an 18-year sentence, authorities are bracing for the peak of California’s fire season and the possibility that others like Robles will attempt to purge their inner demons the same way.

“You put them away and there is another to take their place every year,” said John Adkins, an arson investigator with the California Department of Forestry who arrested Robles.

Arson caused almost $9 million in property losses in California last year and sent 17 firefighters to hospital emergency rooms, according to state fire marshals. Since June, four people have been arrested for setting wildfires in Arizona, California and Colorado; two of them were firefighters.

One of the firefighters, a 19-year-old San Diego man, was arrested Aug. 28 not far from where Robles set his fires and was charged with starting five blazes that destroyed two homes. Arson investigators said another, more recent wildfire that burned nearly 1,100 acres in the Glendale foothills is also suspicious.

Experts expect 20% to 30% of the nation’s wildfires this year to be the work of arsonists, and not even the most skilled investigators fully understand why. But they say these criminals’ motives range from simple vandalism or insurance fraud to an emotional jolt that comes from wreaking havoc--from seeing the flames rise and the fire crews scramble to keep up.

“They are angry,” said Eric Hickey, a criminologist at Cal State Fresno who has conducted studies of serial arsonists for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “Some do it for attention.... They want to be recognized.”

The day Robles was arrested in 1997, he complained to investigators that other students had teased him because he struggled in school and was assigned to classes for slow learners. Although he had a thick build and knew how to defend himself, Robles said, he never fought back.

And he never mentioned the verbal jabs to anyone. But in junior high school, Robles began slicing bloody tracks across his arms with a razor blade--his way of coping with the taunts, he said.

He was shy and more sensitive than other boys in school, said his mother, Erlinda, who goes with her husband to visit their youngest son at the state prison near Chula Vista every two weeks. In contrast, Robles’ two older half brothers had excelled in school and went on to raise families and to establish successful careers in telecommunications and sales.

When Robles reached high school, he started--but didn’t finish--Police Explorer and Junior Firefighter programs (he did complete a two-week “Junior Pups” adventure at Camp Pendleton, run by the Marines). After graduation, Robles signed on with a local volunteer fire department, a first step toward the California Department of Forestry he longed to join.

Things soon began to look up, said Robert Madruga, the San Diego County deputy district attorney who witnessed Robles’ interrogation and later prosecuted him.

“His whole focus became being a firefighter,” Madruga said. “He had realized that he wasn’t going to get where his brothers were and this was the way he could contribute. He could be the hero.”

In a Sparky the firedog costume, carrying a Smokey Bear key chain, Robles tagged along with state firefighters when they gave fire safety presentations at San Diego County elementary schools. Tucked in the driver’s side sun visor of his truck were pictures of wildfires he had helped fight. For his 1996 driver’s license picture, Robles wore the navy blue uniform of his volunteer unit.

His parents were proud. In their living room, pictures of Robles in the uniform were displayed near portraits of him with his girlfriend at the high school prom. The only thing missing now was a paid firefighting position. It was a job Robles would never get. He scored below average on firefighting exams and eventually was asked to leave his volunteer unit.

“Being a volunteer fireman is like being a minor league baseball player,” said Kenneth Elliot, Robles’ defense attorney. “If you are not going to move up, they move you out. He was not going to be a firefighter. When it was taken away from him, he felt he could create his own success.”

He tried to do that, Madruga told a jury at Robles’ 1998 trial, by setting fires.

“Fire is an excellent method to communicate for people who have difficulty asserting themselves,” said Jeffrey Geller, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who has treated serial arsonists. “Fire is simple. It doesn’t require you to talk to anybody and initiate a conversation or explain your needs. The likelihood is high that you will get your message across.”

It also can be an attempt to exercise power, said Timothy G. Huff, a former arson profiler for the FBI who spent 10 years teaching fire investigators.

From interviews he conducted with more than 150 arsonists locked up in state prisons, county jails and mental institutions, Huff and three other experts conducted what is considered the definitive study of the mind of the arsonist.

Most arsonists want “revenge against a person or against a group or against society,” Huff said. “It’s like, ‘I created the damage. I’m empowered, for once.’ ”

Robles appeared more interested in recognition than power. He declined to be interviewed by The Times, but since the day he was arrested has said that he did not intend to burn homes or injure people.

“It had something to do with wanting to feel important and part of something,” according to a probation officer’s report, presented at Robles’ sentencing hearing, that recommended against probation. “He set the fires so that he could be called to fight them. He got satisfaction from fighting the fires rather than setting them.”

Near tears during a lengthy session in an interview room at the Escondido Police Department, Robles told investigators that when he set fires he would enter a state that was “like a dream.” He also said he set the fires to show people “that life isn’t all that happy.”

Typically, Robles set the fires while on his lunch break from his job as a shuttle driver for a Nissan dealership near his Escondido home, Madruga said.

Robles would prowl secondary roads for the right patch of secluded brush and pull over. He would light a cigarette, roll it in a matchbook like he’d seen on TV and toss it out the passenger window of the Bronco. While waiting the six or seven minutes it took the fire to ignite, he would position himself to do what he loved more than anything: appear as the “first responder”--the guy on the front line who is already battling the blaze when fire crews arrive.

Once, when he thought he was alone, Robles was surprised by two passersby who stopped to ask what he was up to, according to the probation officer’s report. Just looking for a rock, Robles told the pair. Later, after a fire in the area had blackened 450 acres and destroyed 11 homes, the onlookers called the Escondido Fire Department to report the encounter.

The tip would eventually lead investigators to Robles. On the day he set his last fire, they pulled him over on an isolated road and, with guns drawn and trained dogs in tow, ordered him out of his truck. It was like something from an episode of “Cops,” Robles said later.

Several brush fires in northern San Diego County before the 1997 flurry remain unsolved, and “[Robles] is on the list of suspects,” Madruga said. The largest was the Harmony Fire a year before his arrest. That blaze blackened more than 24,000 acres near Carlsbad and destroyed 120 houses.

Until the day he was caught in an elaborate operation involving air surveillance and secret cameras, Robles had bargained that setting the fires and then alerting homeowners to the advancing flames would earn him another chance as a firefighter, Madruga said.

“He was convinced that the point was going to come when he was going to be ... highly recognized as this wonderful person,” Madruga said while sifting through boxes of photos and other evidence from the trial. The forest service “wouldn’t have a choice but to hire this guy.”

It was in this hope that Robles had set, then fought, the Escondido fire in 1997. One of the two homes lost that day belonged to Adnan Derbas. His 1930s-era house sat on 350 acres with a view of Lake Hodges and the foothills and ranchland northeast of San Diego.

Derbas said he has a “bad feeling” about the place now and rarely returns. Only the concrete slab and parts of a wall and a chimney remain.

“Here is a guy who caused me tremendous havoc who doesn’t even know my name,” said Derbas, who now lives with his family in San Diego.

Robles is sorry for what he did, said his mother, who keeps a candle burning for him on her fireplace mantel 24 hours a day. He told her the days of setting fires are behind him.

“He still wants to help people in the fire area,” she said. “He told me he would have been out there fighting those [recent] fires. He just wishes he could be helping. But I told them they don’t let an arsonist have a second chance.”