This guy was an IC on Biscuit fire in Oregon … Listen to what he (and other USFS people) have to say about arson. Very “enlightening”
PHOENIX — A federal judge sentenced a former Coconino National Forest Service fire management officer to 24 months in prison Monday for starting a blaze without authorization.
U.S. District Court Judge Paul Rosenblatt rejected the contention of Van Bateman, of Flagstaff, that he simply “cleaned up a little timber” with that fire and at least one other intentionally set burn, albeit without the proper authorization.
“My intent and desires have always been to protect the national forest as best I could,” Bateman, 57, told the judge.
But Rosenblatt said while he is “familiar with Forest Service bureaucracy,” he said Bateman was wrong.
“You simply were doing what you wanted to do rather that what should have been done,” the judge told the 34-year veteran of the Forest Service, who acknowledged setting the Boondock fire three years ago about 45 miles south of Flagstaff.
Bateman has admitted to not only setting the fire during the height of the fire season, but leaving the scene, then calling in his team to fight the blaze as if it were a wildfire without telling anyone that he set it.
Nor was the judge impressed by more than 50 letters from others — many former Forest Service employees — who wrote that they had done the same thing. In fact, the judge suggested those letters were one reason he was rejecting a plea by Grant Woods to place his client on probation.
“That’s kind of chilling,” Rosenblatt said of the letters. “Too much paperwork simply doesn’t cut it.”
Bateman also will have to pay a $5,000 fine and $10,390 in restitution to the Forest Service. Once released, he will be on supervised probation for another three years and will have to undergo a psychological exam.
The two-year sentence was the maximum Rosenblatt could impose under the terms of a plea deal.
As part of that deal, prosecutors dropped a second charge of burning timber without authorization connected with the Mother fire several weeks earlier. And they dismissed more serious arson charges in connection with both incidents.
The judge rejected a recommendation from a probation officer that he reject the plea deal and send Bateman away for at least 46 months.
“I’ve never felt that I did anything wrong,” Bateman said after the sentencing. He will be free for the next 45 days before he has to report for incarceration.
“I’ve never claimed to be lily white,” he continued. “The only thing I’m guilty of is not getting the proper authorization to do what I did.”
But Bob Schinzel, who had been the assistant special agent in charge of the Department of Agriculture in Phoenix — the agency that includes the Forest Service — said evidence showed otherwise.
Schinzel said once there was suspicion Bateman was setting fires he was tracked through a satellite positioning system in his computer. Schinzel said that tracking showed Bateman at the scene of several blazes.
More significant, Schinzel said, Bateman fled quickly, something he said clearly is not done when setting a prescribed burn.
And prosecutor Kim Hare told the judge that Bateman, in an earlier statement, never mentioned “prescribed burns.”
“He never thought he’d get caught,” she said.
“He didn’t have a good excuse at the time why he set them,” Hare continued. “Now he does.”
And she said that excuse, even if true, should not allow him to escape prison.
“I believe that the defendant’s ego got the better of him,” she told the judge. “We do not allow defendants to come in here and take the law into their own hands.”
But Woods told Rosenblatt that’s exactly what the judge should consider, citing the letters from other veteran Forest Service employees.
“When they see a situation that’s dangerous to the forest, they take care of it,” he said. “They’re not criminals.”
At worst, Woods said, his client is “a bit of a cowboy.” But he said Bateman was not unlike other long-term Forest Service employees who cut corners on the rules.
“The bureaucrats don’t like that,” Woods said.
In a written statement to the court, Forest Service Chief Abigail Kimbell said that claims that agency workers commonly set fires without authorization “are untrue and do not reflect reality.”
“These claims impugn the integrity of our nation’s professional wildland firefighters who put their lives on the line to protect people, their communities and our natural resources,” she said in the statement, read aloud in court by Gene Blankenbaker, supervisor of the Tonto National Forest. “Furthermore, these claims diminish public confidence in the use of fire to meet stewardship objectives.”
“Schinzel said once there was suspicion Bateman was setting fires he was tracked through a satellite positioning system in his computer. Schinzel said that tracking showed Bateman at the scene of several blazes.
More significant, Schinzel said, Bateman fled quickly, something he said clearly is not done when setting a prescribed burn.”
Most significantly, he was tracked, while minding his business.
Where the hell are we again?!?
I have to rant somewhere:
I’ve been watching a jet aircraft circle at an altitude between the flight paths from SeaTac and local private aircraft and military from JBLM just southeast of me. Three days and counting.
Who, but government has the money to do this shit?
If they are on fire watch, don’t circle the same airspace for three consecutive days. Map making, use a copy machine, not dozens of passes per day for multiple days in the same spot. And, did I say it is a jet aircraft? $$$
Why the hell is my tax money fueling this psychotic, obsessive/compulsive circling.
Bait man.
Isn’t that the guy that played Batman…?
I mean fk.
Where can I get a job setting fires..?
Sht….
I almost set myself on fire lighting my BBQ the other day.
Nobody sent me a job application.