More than six weeks after a cluster of wildfires tore through the Spokane area and forced tens of thousands of residents to flee their homes, the criminal case against the man accused of starting the largest of those blazes is now moving on two separate tracks — one state, one federal — while his mental fitness to stand trial remains unresolved.
Aaron Farinacci, 37, a Spokane resident, remains in the Spokane County Jail as of September 16, held on multi-million-dollar bond and facing multiple state counts of first-degree arson as well as a federal arson indictment handed up by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Washington. He has not yet entered a formal plea to the state charges, and a competency evaluation ordered by a Spokane County judge has paused arraignment and delayed substantive proceedings.
The case has become the focal point of a region still digging out from one of the most destructive fire seasons in its recorded history — and a test of how the justice system handles a defendant whose alleged crimes touched the lives of tens of thousands of people.
What authorities say happened
According to the Spokane County Sheriff's Office, which led the investigation, Farinacci is the suspect in the Old Trails Fire, the largest of three major blazes that struck the Spokane area in early August 2026. Sheriff John Nowels publicly announced the arrest, describing Farinacci as the suspect in the largest of the Spokane fires.
The Old Trails Fire began on Saturday, August 1, 2026. Within days it had grown to threaten large swaths of Spokane County, prompting evacuation orders that ultimately displaced between 64,000 and 65,000 people across Spokane and surrounding communities during the peak of the crisis.
The sheriff's office has not, in the material available publicly, detailed what evidence investigators gathered or what alleged method they believe was used to start the fire. Officials have said the investigation spanned multiple fires in the county dating back roughly two years, and that the state charges against Farinacci include at least one count tied specifically to the Old Trails Fire along with additional counts connected to other fires in the area.
The scale of the destruction
The numbers attached to the Old Trails Fire alone are stark. The blaze burned more than 3,500 acres and destroyed more than 400 structures. Across the three major Spokane-area fires, officials have put the total number of buildings destroyed at between 700 and 850.
By early August, the Old Trails Fire was reported at roughly 43 percent containment. Full containment and mop-up were achieved in the weeks that followed, and the fire is no longer actively threatening the Spokane area. Recovery and damage-assessment efforts, however, continue — a process that in fire-scarred communities typically stretches well beyond the point at which the flames are out.
For a metropolitan area of Spokane's size, the loss of hundreds of homes in a single season represents a housing and humanitarian crisis that will shape local politics, insurance markets and rebuilding decisions for years. The evacuation of some 65,000 people also stands as one of the largest single emergency displacements in the region's modern history.
Parallel state and federal cases
The legal architecture of the case is unusual in its reach. On Wednesday, September 9, 2026, a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Washington returned an arson indictment against Farinacci. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Washington announced the indictment publicly on Friday, September 11.
That federal charge runs alongside the state prosecution in Spokane County Superior Court, where prosecutors have filed multiple counts of first-degree arson. Farinacci therefore faces simultaneous proceedings in two court systems, each with its own procedures, evidentiary rules and — potentially — sentencing frameworks. In practical terms, dual prosecutions can mean separate detention decisions, separate discovery obligations and a defendant shuttled between county and federal custody.
Authorities have not indicated publicly how they intend to sequence the two cases, nor whether federal prosecutors are pursuing charges that would in any way supersede or complement those filed by Spokane County. Under U.S. practice, federal and state prosecutions for conduct arising from the same events are generally permitted, though courts and prosecutors often coordinate to avoid inefficiencies.
Competency evaluation stalls the state case
The most immediate procedural question is not whether Farinacci will be tried, but when — and whether he is fit to participate in his own defence.
In state court, Farinacci's defence attorney requested a mental competency evaluation before he enters a plea. A Spokane County judge approved a competency evaluation order in the days following his arrest, pausing arraignment and delaying substantive proceedings until his mental fitness to stand trial is assessed.
As of mid-September, he has not entered a formal plea to the state arson counts, and hearings have been repeatedly conditioned on the competency review. Under Washington state law, a competency evaluation examines whether a defendant understands the nature of the proceedings against him and can assist counsel in his own defence. A finding of incompetence does not normally end a case; it typically leads to treatment and periodic re-evaluation, with prosecution resuming if and when competency is restored.
That process can take weeks or months, and it leaves victims, evacuees and displaced homeowners without resolution for the foreseeable future — a delay that is legally routine but emotionally difficult for a community that lost so much.
A defendant with a prior record
Public records and media reports describe Farinacci as a convicted felon with a prior manslaughter conviction for killing his father, for which he served time in prison before being released back into the community.
That prior history is likely to figure prominently in any eventual trial and in decisions by the court about detention and bond. It is not, however, evidence of guilt in the arson case. Farinacci is presumed innocent of the current charges unless and until the state or federal government proves them beyond a reasonable doubt, and the competency evaluation is a threshold issue about process rather than a determination about what happened on August 1.
It is worth noting what the public record does not yet contain. There has been no published account of a confession, no detailed account of the alleged ignition mechanism, and no transparent presentation of the evidence that led investigators from a two-year pattern of fires to a single suspect. In high-profile wildfire arson cases, that evidentiary gap is often where the real legal battle is fought.
Different perspectives on the case
From the perspective of law enforcement, the arrest closes the investigative loop on a fire that authorities had been working for weeks. The Spokane County Sheriff's Office, with Sheriff Nowels as its public face, has framed the arrest as the product of a sustained investigation not only into the Old Trails Fire but into a string of fires stretching back roughly two years — a pattern that, if substantiated, would represent a rare and serious serial arson case in the Pacific Northwest.
From the defence side, the request for a competency evaluation signals that the defence's first priority is Farinacci's mental state and ability to participate in proceedings — a legally standard move that also implicitly raises questions about his culpability and capacity that could shape the case's trajectory.
For residents of the affected communities, the dominant concerns are more practical: insurance claims, temporary housing, rebuilding timelines and the question of how a community rebuilds hundreds of lost homes amid an ongoing regional housing shortage. Some victims' advocates have argued that recovery resources have not moved fast enough; local officials, meanwhile, have pointed to the sheer scale of the destruction across three simultaneous fires.
And for the broader public, the case raises uncomfortable questions about prevention. Wildfire arson is notoriously difficult to detect and prosecute, and the fact that investigators connected multiple fires over two years to a single suspect has prompted questions about whether earlier intervention was possible — questions that officials have not, to date, answered in detail.
What happens next
Three timelines now run in parallel.
The first is legal and procedural. The competency evaluation must be completed and reviewed by a judge before the state case can advance. If Farinacci is found competent, arraignment proceeds and a plea is entered; if he is not, the case enters a treatment and re-evaluation cycle. The federal case in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington has its own calendar, and it remains unclear whether the federal proceedings will also pause pending the competency determination or proceed on a separate schedule.
The second is the recovery timeline. Damage assessments continue across the burn areas, and rebuilding hundreds of structures will take years. Evacuation orders have long since been lifted, but temporary displacement, insurance disputes and infrastructure repair will outlast the criminal case by a wide margin.
The third is the political timeline. Wildfire preparedness, emergency response and arson investigation resources are perennial subjects of debate in Washington state and across the fire-prone West, and a case of this magnitude is likely to intensify scrutiny of how fires are investigated, how quickly suspects are identified, and whether local agencies have the tools they need.
Forward-looking analysis
The Farinacci case is, at this stage, a case about process. The most consequential decisions made so far — the federal indictment, the competency order — are procedural rather than substantive, and neither resolves the central factual question of who or what started the Old Trails Fire.
That may change. A federal arson indictment typically means prosecutors believe they have evidence strong enough to secure a conviction before a jury, and federal grand juries are not convened casually. But the historical record of wildfire arson prosecutions suggests that these cases are often contested on questions of causation, intent and the reliability of forensic fire evidence — and that they can take years to resolve.
For Spokane, the arithmetic of what was lost is already fixed: more than 3,500 acres burned in a single fire, more than 400 structures destroyed by that fire alone, somewhere between 700 and 850 buildings lost across the season, and roughly 65,000 people forced from their homes at the peak of the emergency.
What remains open is whether the courts will produce an account of responsibility that the community accepts — and whether the systems meant to prevent this kind of catastrophe will be judged adequate when the rebuilding is finished and the headlines fade. On both counts, the answers are still ahead.