A criminal justice professor in California was arrested over the weekend after federal investigators say he started a series of forest fires in a remote area of Northern California near where the massive Dixie Fire continues to burn.
Agents with the California Forestry Department took Dr. Gary Stephen Maynard into custody on Saturday and charged with intentionally setting fire to federal land for allegedly setting multiple fires in Lassen National Forest and Shasta Trinity National Forest late last month.
The 47-year-old lecturer has worked at several colleges in the state, including Sonoma State University and Santa Clara University, The Sacramento Bee reported.
According to the criminal complaint, filed Sunday in the U.S. District Court in Eastern California, authorities on the morning of July 20 received reports about a wildfire on the western slope of Mt. Shasta, later designated the Cascade Fire. An investigator arrived on the scene and found two vehicles parked about 75 yards off of an un-named dirt road, one of which allegedly belonged to Maynard.
Per the complaint, when the Investigator Brian Murphy approached Maynard’s vehicle, he was on his back trying to dig his vehicle out after getting it stuck while trying to drive across a partially buried boulder. Maynard told Murphy that he didn’t know anything about the fire and became agitated when Murphy told him he wasn’t authorized to use his government vehicle tow Maynard’s car.
