A worker set a warehouse on fire to send a message and uploaded everything to Facebook. Now, he is arrested.
On Tuesday April 7, a fire broke out in a 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse in Ontario. After posting a video of himself setting paper inside the warehouse on fire, Chamel Abdulkarim was arrested for arson.
The Fire
On Tuesday April 7 at 12:30am, firefighters were called to a blazing warehouse in Ontario. The warehouse was a distribution center for the company Kimberly-Clark, containing toilet paper, Kleenex, diapers, and more. About 175 firefighters responded to the emergency but were quickly forced out of the building due to “extremely rapid fire growth”. The fire quickly became overwhelming, making it a category 6 blaze. It resulted in in more than $600 million in damage, with $500 million in paper products destroyed as well as the $150 million warehouse.
Luckily, no one got hurt. When the fire broke out, 20 people were working inside the facility and were evacuated. One employee was initially reported missing, according to the Los Angeles Times. That missing person was 29-year-old Chamel Abdulkarim himself.
Arson
At first, the consensus seemed to be that the robots inside the building potentially caused the fire, a worker told KABC.
There was no suspicion that it was him – actually, he was missing. So everyone was trying to find him. Everyone was blaming the robots at first. We were almost 100% sure it was the robots until the action in the video, of course.
The video in question is a clip of Abdulkarim filming himself he shared on his non-public Facebook page. Abc7 details police finding the incriminating video from that night in the warehouse. It shows the disgruntled worker setting fire to toilet paper and other combustibles inside the building. Multiple small fires are burning as he says:
You know, if you’re not going to pay us enough... to afford to live, at least pay us enough not to do this.
The Charges
The 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse was destroyed. As a result, Abdulkarim was charged with one count of aggravated arson and six counts of arson of a structure, abc7 reports. He now faces ten years to life in prison if convicted on all counts. He is currently being held without bail.
The New Luigi Mangione?
After setting the fire, Abdulkarim called a coworker comparing himself to Luigi Mangione, the 27-year-old who allegedly killed the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare and became an anti-capitalist icon and hero for some.
He also reportedly texted others:
I just cost these ****ers billions.
Abdulkarim's message contains an anti-capitalist rhetoric criticising the low wages he and his colleagues make in comparison with high living cost resulting in them not earning enough to be able to live comfortably.
This comparison shows Abdulkarim wants to stage himself as a kind of martyr who sacrificed his freedom to send a message and get back at the capitalist system and its companies.
The thing is, he did not work for Kimberly-Clark, the owner of the warehouse, but for NFI Industries, a third-party distribution company for Kimberly-Clark products. They are who pay his wages, so his whole attack against whoever pays him too little to live did not even hurt the right company.
His frustration is very understandable and he (kind of) did what he set out to do. Although he did not affect the right company, he did attract attention to the issue at hand: workers earning too little to live. But even though the message is right – workers should be able to earn enough money to live comfortably – this is not the way to go about it. The problem is a known fact in society, not something new he discovered. He put a lot of people in danger and many lost their jobs because of him. He risked serious injury and death of innocent people – workers just like him – to spread a message that is already known.
