Investigators think a machine gun may have sparked the Caldor Fire.
Sources tell the Sacramento Bee that investigators are looking into a possible target practice incident. The criminal complaint alleges that 32-year-old Travis Shane Smith and his 66-year-old father, David Scott Smith, converted a firearm into a machine gun and that they possessed a silencer. The two are being held at the El Dorado County Jail, each on on-million-dollars bail. They're scheduled to make their first court appearance through video call today. The Caldor Fire burned more than 200,000 acres along the Hwy. 50 corridor between Pollock Pines and South Lake Tahoe. Two civilians in the Grizzly Flats area were severely injured and one firefighter also sustained injuries in the fire.
"It doesn’t change anything for a lot of us," said Jodi Lauther, a Grizzly Flats resident on the arrest of the suspects. "We still lost our houses. It doesn’t bring our houses back. It doesn’t bring our memories back."
"It may not have been on purpose," said resident Katie Thomas on the starting of the fire. "It may have been a complete accident, but honestly, I don’t care. My house is gone."