OAN Staff Addie Davis
5:30 PM – Monday, April 13, 2026
Despite incriminating video evidence purportedly recorded by the defendant himself, 29-year-old Chamel Abdulkarim pleaded not guilty on Monday to multiple charges stemming from a massive warehouse fire in Ontario, California.
According to the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, Abdulkarim, a resident of Highland, faces seven counts of arson, including one count of aggravated arson, for purportedly igniting several separate fires on Tuesday within a 1.2 million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark Corporation facility.
Investigators say that Abdulkarim not only filmed his actions as he set the blazes about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, but also shared the footage on social media, providing a digital trail that led to his identification and subsequent prosecution.
Federal prosecutors have characterized Chamel Abdulkarim as a radicalized leftist who orchestrated the warehouse fire as a calculated political statement, drawing explicit parallels between his actions and the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
According to court documents cited by the New York Post, Abdulkarim allegedly contacted a woman following the incident to liken his arson to the actions of Luigi Mangione, stating that “a lot of people are going to understand” his motivations — just as they did when Mangione “popped” the executive, in his own words.
This ideological motive was also supported by social media footage purportedly recorded by the defendant, in which he can be heard chanting, “all you had to do was pay us enough to live,” while filming himself igniting the flames.
“All you had to do was pay us enough to live. Pay us more of the value WE bring. Not corporate. Didn’t see the shareholders picking up a shift,” he says in the video. The Post also reported that Abdulkarim added that the company “had it coming” while declaring “I just cost the motherf**kers billions.”
The scale of the destruction at the Kimberly-Clark facility was immense, resulting in an estimated $500 million in damages and requiring a massive response from 175 firefighters to eventually suppress the blaze. While roughly 20 employees, including Abdulkarim himself, were inside the structure when the fires began, authorities confirmed that no injuries were reported.
Although Abdulkarim was initially unaccounted for during the chaos, law enforcement apprehended him on Tuesday while the fire was still active. He now faces federal scrutiny alongside state charges as investigators piece together the full extent of the premeditated attack.
“This is part of the concerning trend we’re seeing, particularly with younger people who are being radicalized by left wing ideology,” U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli told The Post.
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