A man who started a 2020 wildfire that killed 12 endangered California condors and seriously injured a firefighter was sentenced to 24 years in state prison, prosecutors said.
Ivan Gomez, 31, was sentenced Wednesday by a Monterey County judge for setting the Big Sur Dolan fire while illegally growing marijuana in the Los Padres National Forest, the county district attorney’s office announced. The blaze erupted on Aug. 18, 2020, on the central coast northwest of Los Angeles. It destroyed 10 homes and an 80-acre condor sanctuary in Big Sur that since 1997 had been used to release captive-bred condors into the wild. There weren’t any condors in the facility at the time but a dozen birds died as the blaze spread across 125,000 acres of forest.
Gomez was arrested after state parks officers spotted the fire and received reports of a man throwing rocks at cars on a highway, authorities said.