California Worker Charged in $650M Warehouse Arson

A 29-year-old warehouse worker in Southern California faces state and federal arson charges after allegedly setting fire to a massive distribution center early Tuesday morning, destroying the facility and causing an estimated $650 million in damages.

Chamel Abdulkarim of Highland, California, was arrested hours after the blaze broke out around 12:30 a.m. on April 7 in a 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse in Ontario, about 35 miles east of Los Angeles. The building, operated by NFI Industries as a third-party distributor for Kimberly-Clark paper products, housed pallets of inventory that fueled the rapid spread of the flames. Firefighters from the Ontario Fire Department arrived to find the fire escalating quickly, forcing them to evacuate and adopt a defensive strategy with high-volume hoses. The conflagration grew to a six-alarm response, drawing around 175 personnel from multiple agencies, and caused the roof to collapse. No injuries were reported among the 20 workers on site at the time.

Prosecutors say Abdulkarim, a disgruntled employee frustrated over wages, recorded himself igniting multiple small fires on stacked paper goods inside the warehouse. In one video posted to...