Five Acadia National Park Fires Were Allegedly Arson
by Marie Weidmayer/Bangor Daily News
ACADIA NATIONAL PARK—Five wildland fires at Acadia National Park in a year and a half span were arson, according to federal court records.
A request for a search warrant was unsealed in the U.S. District Court of Maine in Bangor on Tuesday, which outlines what the National Park Service alleges were five arson fires started by one man on St. Sauveur Mountain in Mount Desert Island in 2023 and 2024.
It is the only public information about the case at this time, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
These are the first public documents to describe how a Trenton man allegedly started the fires at a time when it would be impossible for natural causes to start them. The blazes were previously reported as being wildfires.
A U.S. Park Ranger filed an affidavit in support of a search warrant application on Aug. 14, 2024, to get the location data from the cellphone of the man believed to have started the fires. The documents were sealed until Tuesday at the request of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, according to court records.
It was impossible for the fires to be started by natural causes, like a lightning strike, the affidavit said. The environmental conditions were not right for a discarded cigarette butt to start the fires and there was no evidence of a camp stove or other open flame inadvertently starting the fires.
“The only possible means of ignition was for a person to have intentionally started the fires,” the affidavit said of all five fires.
The Trenton man, 31 years old when the search warrant request was filed, called the park service to report two fires on April 23, 2023, according to the affidavit. He used his cellphone and provided his name. The Bangor Daily News does not name people who have not been criminally charged.
The fires were set about 200 feet apart along a hiking trail only accessible by foot, the search warrant affidavit said. Firefighters at the scene responded to the blaze as a singular fire.
A park ranger interviewed the man a week after the fires, and there were “multiple inconsistencies” in his story. He also said he saw smoke while on the trail but kept hiking instead of investigating.
Those fires burned a half-acre of woods, according to a previous Bangor Daily News article.
Another fire was set Oct. 1, 2023, about a 16-minute hike from the location of the April fires, court records said. A group of hikers came across a fire in a roughly 2-foot square with flames about 4 feet tall. It was in a “pile of dead and dry sticks and twigs” with no fire ring and had started about five minutes before the hikers found it, the affidavit said.
The hikers put the fire out using water, soil and other resources, the affidavit said.
Shortly before finding the fire, the hikers saw three people going down the mountain. Two were middle aged and there was “nothing remarkable” about them, the witnesses told park rangers.
The third person stood out to the witnesses, according to court records.
In a written statement about the man, a witness said, “Despite the fact that he was hiking down a moderate slope, he seemed to be breathing hard. He also seemed nervous, and his eyes darted around rapidly rather than hold my gaze as we greeted one another.”
The description of the man matched the person who called in the April fire. When presented with a photo lineup, the witnesses were not confident anyone in the lineup was the man they saw, the affidavit said.
Two more arson fires were started May 11, 2024, again on St. Sauveur Mountain. Those fires were about .2 miles apart from each other, and one was about 43 feet away from the April 2023 fire.
A car registered to the Trenton man was at Acadia Mountain Parking, which is used for that mountain, at the time of the fire, according to the affidavit. The man was interviewed by a park ranger when he came off the mountain that day.
Maine Forest Rangers used a helicopter to help put out the fire, a previous BDN article said.
The man gave the ranger his real name and a fake phone number that went to a disconnected landline in Manhattan, court records said.
The location data for the man’s cellphone were provided by AT&T on Aug. 24, 2024, 10 days after the request, according to court records.
This story appears through a media partnership with the Bangor Daily News. This allows the BDN to use a certain amount of our stories a week and we can also choose to share that paper’s. There have been minor modifications to this article.
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