After some legal hemming and hawing, a Hood River judge has ordered the 15-year-old boy who started last summer’s Eagle Creek Fire in the Columbia River Gorge to pay over $36 million for the damage caused by his actions.
$36 million.
That number, which the teenager’s lawyer, Jack Morris, claims is “frankly, is on its face, absurd,” will be divvied up between the victims of the fire, including families affected by the fast-spreading blaze, Oregon Department of Transportation, and the US Forest Service. Morris called the decision “cruel and unusual punishment” for the Vancouver teen, whose family immigrated from Ukraine in 2000. Because he’s a minor (and because of death threats), the teen’s identity has been concealed throughout the case.
According to Hood River County Circuit Judge John A. Olson, asking a kid to cough up tens of million of dollars does not “shock the moral sense of reasonable people.'”
As an occasionally reasonable person, I am pretty shocked by this news.
Let’s revisit the circumstances that led to this decision: On September 2, this teenager threw a firework near Punch Bowl Falls, a majestic stop along on the Columbia Gorge’s Eagle Creek trail. He was with a group of six other teens who were filming the fireworks show and encouraging his behavior. The group bolted after the fireworks unintentionally (but unsurprisingly) set the dry forest ablaze, but a number of witnesses saw the entire series of events go down.
Immediately, this teenager and his family became the main target of the region’s vicious anger over the destruction caused by the fire (that anger, it’s worth remembering, included death threats). In a profile of the teen published by the Oregonian in November, his mother said her son had suffered emotional trauma from the experience, and that she was scared for her family’s safety.
After the 49,000-acre fire was eventually put out, ecologists noted that the dry forest was overdue for a major fire—and that these types of wildfires are ultimately necessary and healthy for a forest ecosystem. Much like the pending Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake, the devastating Eagle Creek fire was going to happen sooner or later, experts explained.
On top of this, the Columbia Gorge Scenic Area’s federally mandated “governing management plan” was four years overdue for a comprehensive update. The plan, created and updated by the Columbia River Gorge Commission, is meant to prepare the changing landscape for potential threats to natural resources and shared recreational spaces. The commission is currently aiming to refresh this plan by 2020, six years after it was supposed to be updated.
Judging by the evidence, it was a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances that ignited the Eagle Creek fire: a terribly dry summer (thanks, climate change), an outdated management plan, a ticking time bomb of a healthy forest fire, and a group of reckless teens up to no good. So why are we only pointing fingers at one part of that dangerous equation?
It’s not apparent if the 15-year-old has any financial backing to begin paying off the court-ordered restitution. In his written decision, Judge Olsen mentioned the teen could apply for some kind of payment plan to eventually pay the entirety of the $36,618,330.24 he now owes. Olsen also noted that state law allows juvenile defendants to stop paying off these payments after ten years, if the defendant doesn’t commit any other crimes and follows the payment plan. But that’s now up to the criminal justice system to set up.
In addition to the fee, the teenager was sentenced five years’ probation and 1,920 hours of community service with the US Forest Service—and is ordered to write apology letters to 152 victims of the fire.
Is this really the best our legal system can do to right this irreversible wrong? A few alternatives to Judge Olsen’s ruling: Banning the sale of fireworks during Oregon’s driest seasons (deal with it, July 4th), burdening the kid and his fellow youths with heftier public service obligations rather than financial ones, or maybe banning all teenagers from all public spaces in general. By Olsen’s standards, that last one’s probably the most “reasonable.”
Are we okay with it? I mean judges (and juries) make bad decisions all of the time, many decisions I am personally not okay with at all, but…what to do about? The thing about this country is, the only thing, the ONLY THING, anyone care about is money. Loss of money = pain and punishment. Money = reward. Money Money Money. Americans LOVE MONEY above all else – it is the only thing they care about. That’s why this ridiculous punishment was handed down.
Everyone with one brain cell knows this is absolutely ridiculous. The kid will never have that kind of money to pay it off, will be bilked for everything they can legally get from him (you can only garnish so much of a person’s wages) and in the end who knows how much he will actually pay. It certainly won’t be anywhere near $36 million.
Additionally, the absurd sentence will not prevent dumb ass teenagers from doing stupid things. Personally, I’d have punished him by making him have to be a firefighter for his entire life. It is difficult, dangerous, life threatening work. Sounds about right to me. Sounds more reasonable than asking his dumb ass to pay $36 million.
Before writing this editorial, you should have looked up the word “restitution.”
Restitution is not –as you appear to assume –a punishment. It’s an award intended to make the victims whole.
The judge can’t just pick a number out of thin air. He set the restitution award at the amount that corresponds to the harm that the victims suffered.
Who should pay for that, if it isn’t the person who started the fire?
Super surprised there no comments like “pour his blood directly into my mouth” yet.
You fail to make any real point here, since its abundantly clear this fine is not intended to be paid off. This is a horribly written and thought out article.
@Suzette Smith That sure is helpful.
@Euphonius is correct and it’s pretty shocking that this was even allowed to go online, unless the Merc is solely going for clickbait bullshit. Not to mention he will stop paying after ten years and the amount he will have to pay is solely based on his income! The fine is meaningless to him, and the hours sentenced are far too low!
If the kids involved sought help immediately so people could start fighting the fire before it spread enough to nearly destroy the entire Oregon side of the gorge and make it rain ash as far as Portland, I would have more sympathy. The dollar amount is ridiculous, he’ll pay as much of his wages that can be garnished for ten years, a minimal percentage of $36 mil. The community service is right. The person who said he should be a firefighter for the rest of his life is spot on, as is the article’s suggestion to ban fireworks. How did a minor get fireworks in the first place? And is the person responsible for getting the kid the fireworks responsible for anything?
“Judging by the evidence, it was a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances that ignited the Eagle Creek fire: a terribly dry summer (thanks, climate change), an outdated management plan, a ticking time bomb of a healthy forest fire, and a group of reckless teens up to no good. So why are we only pointing fingers at one part of that dangerous equation?”
Because the “reckless teens” are exactly the scope of this trial?
As an occasionally reasonable person, ardently opposed to cruel and unusual punishment and the death penalty, I’m fine with this judgement. It’s clear that the young man will never pay the full amount back, but that’s not the important part. Hopefully, this will act as a deterrent so other folks won’t do something this dumb. The community service is the most important part of the sentence.
Well, since I’m included in that “we” I will say that I am okay with it for a whole variety of reasons. One, restitution as Euphonius mentioned is a very common standard in cases like this. I have no doubt that number could have been higher. Two, the teen’s reckless behavior — HIS lack of fundamental sensibility — is the event that kicked off this entire shitshow, and ultimately he must bear the responsibility for his actions. Three, as much as I sound like a crank for saying it, I think that message of responsibility is a good thing. More than likely the court will revisit in 10 years and adjust but in the mean time let him live under the weight of that debt and try to at least partially make up for what he did.
I anxiously await the follow-up piece, exploring the teen’s white privilege.
This kid will pay less for this restitution than most of us will to pay off student loans.
You are all lunatics.
If the fire can burn for that long and intensely the forest is unmanaged, there is no back burning.
If it’s a crime for that forest to burn the way it did, then you folks should have your wages garnished too, for criminal neglect.
It would have gone up sooner or later in the coming seasons as all forests naturally do – who would you blame then, or bill the costs of having a standing fire service to?
Financially crippling a kid before he starts his life doesn’t exculpate you from your part in the equation, and you are abysmally stupid people to a) think otherwise, and b) support the punishment of this kid to a degree that defies all reason and common sense.
The act was not intended to start a fire, and this punishment is intended as humiliation. 152 letter of apology, for God’s sake. One public one would be enough.
Some time spent rehabbing the forest would be good for the kid as it is nice country and he’d get to know it and value it – if any of you lot actually gave a fig you’d be out there working it with him.
But you don’t. You’re just the mob looking for an easy answer to pin your grievances and boredom on.
There is a saying in life – ‘shit happens’. Forest fires are one and stupid kids are another.
Just get used to it and if you can’t handle the tax burden of managing a forest disband your fire service and be done with it, instead of carrying on like idiots when some stupid kid comes along and unintentionally starts a fire – the scale of which he would not have been aware of.
make Comcast pay for it lol
I don’t see how banning the sale of fireworks in Oregon will do anything as the arsonist was from Washington and likely bought his fireworks there. Pretty much everything can be purchased just over the river and typically in my neighborhood most of the fireworks people are lighting off are not legal in Oregon.
Great. So now a pro-clearcut dude has got a sad about this young lad’s future. Very sincerely, too.
Beginning to see, Mercury? This is who you’ve allied yourself with.
No, the Merc has no idea what it’s doing. It’s editorially incoherent and is only interested in sensationalistic click-bait.
Also, the current batch of shithorns who run the thing lack the integrity to engage with their readership when they disagree, which I note is often.
This is the paper that called it “a victory” when those two white ladies were threatened out of business for selling burritos. Then they quietly shitcanned the author of the article. They published the thoughts of a man who sometimes felt uncomfortable here, as he is Indian, which was then extrapolated into a larger statement on the state of race relations in Portland. They ran a cover story about a queer Latina who is Larger, and once cried after a hike. Her brave journey toward starting a business for other people with a nonspecific complaint against “hiking culture” was chronicled here, for some reason.
So they stir up race-hate for clicks on a bad day, and grossly misrepresent things on every other. They could talk back when we bitch, but they don’t. In fact, on the burrito-gate article, they deleted comments that weren’t racist or inflammatory.
I dunno: Advertiser boycott, anyone?
Lol. I think WW is trolling the Mercury. Has it really come to this?
http://www.wweek.com/news/courts/2018/05/22/hes-paying-what-how-is-a-teenager-seriously-supposed-to-pay-that-much-money-to-people-who-lost-property-in-the-columbia-river-gorge-fire/
So one of our weeklies concern-trolls us about a subject it clearly doesn’t understand, and the other provides actual reportage. Wonderful.