Aaron Farinacci, a 37-year-old Spokane man, set approximately 25 separate fires across Spokane County, Washington over five weeks. He told investigators the conditions were ideal to "let the fire take its course." He said he knew one of the blazes "was gonna get bad."
Nine hundred families can confirm he was right about that.
Farinacci now faces formal arson charges in connection with the Old Trails fire, a 3,200-acre inferno that has destroyed more than 900 structures as of Thursday. His bond is set at $1 million. But the part that should keep you up at night isn't the scale of the destruction — it's the timeline that preceded it.
Records show Farinacci's serial arson spree began on July 4, 2025. The Spokane County Sheriff's Office has linked him to approximately 25 fires over the next five weeks. The Aubrey White fire ignited July 6 near mile marker 30 of the Centennial Trail. The Fort George fire hit Riverside State Park on August 11, burning 15 acres. Fire after fire after fire, week after week — and at no point during this five-week rampage did the system manage to take his lighter away.
This wasn't a phantom arsonist operating under cover of darkness. Farinacci was previously convicted of manslaughter in Arizona. A violent felon with a documented history of killing someone. The kind of person whose name should light up every database a law enforcement officer touches. He wasn't invisible. He was ignored.
The man was living at the Copper River Apartments in Spokane. He had a known address. He had a prior conviction for taking a human life. And while he was systematically setting fire to the county he lived in, whatever combination of parole systems, criminal databases, and law enforcement networks that was supposed to be monitoring a convicted killer was apparently occupied with other priorities.
We all know what comes next in the media playbook when a Western wildfire makes national news. The cameras arrive, the anchors adopt their grave expressions, and every outlet within 72 hours publishes some variation of "climate change is making wildfire season longer and more dangerous." It's practically a Mad Libs template at this point. Fill in the state, fill in the acreage, copy-paste the paragraph about drought conditions and insufficient federal funding. The framing is always the same: nature did this, and if you don't support massive new green spending programs, you basically started the fire yourself.
What never seems to make the A-block is the guy with the matches.
Some will note that dry conditions helped these fires spread faster once they were lit. Nobody's arguing with thermodynamics. But pointing at the weather as the root cause of a fire that a human being deliberately started is like blaming the highway for a drunk driver. Aaron Farinacci didn't wait for climate conditions to hand him an opportunity. He spent five weeks creating his own opportunities, and the system gave him every one of those weeks as a gift.
This is the revolving door at its most destructive. Not a petty shoplifter getting a citation and walking out of a CVS. A convicted killer. A documented serial arsonist. A man who told authorities exactly what he was doing — and the system's response was to file it somewhere and move on. Every institution that should have intervened — probation, parole, local law enforcement, the courts — either didn't know about his history, didn't care, or didn't have the authority to act. Pick whichever answer you find least disturbing. None of them are comforting.
Nine hundred structures didn't burn because of carbon emissions or insufficient climate legislation. They burned because one man decided to light them on fire, and every institution responsible for stopping him treated his violent criminal history like a clerical footnote.
The bond is $1 million. It probably should have been set 24 fires ago.