The master tenant of an Oakland warehouse where 36 people perished when a fire ignited during a 2016 music event pleaded guilty Friday to the deaths, avoiding a second trial after the first ended in a hung jury.
Derick Almena, 50, pleaded guilty to 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter in exchange for a 12-year sentence. Already free on bail, Almena likely won't return to jail because of the nearly three years he already spent behind bars and credit for good behavior.
Alameda County Superior Court Judge Trina Thompson read each count with the name of each victim. When she asked Almena his plea for each charge, he answered “guilty,” but his quiet responses were sometimes inaudible through an online stream of the hearing held virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Thompson scheduled sentencing for March 8, when she will determine whether Almena will pay restitution, continue to be monitored electronically at his home in rural Northern California, and be subject to supervised probation. Families of the victims will also be allowed to give victim impact statements at that time.
Prosecutors say Almena was criminally negligent when he illegally converted the industrial warehouse in Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood into a residence and event space for artists, dubbed the “Ghost Ship," stuffing the two-story building with flammable materials and extension cords. It had no smoke detectors or sprinklers.
The Dec. 2, 2016 inferno broke out at the warehouse during an electronic music event, trapping victims on the illegally constructed second floor. Prosecutors said the victims got no warning and had little chance to escape down a narrow, ramshackle staircase.
The case has been emotionally wrenching for family and friends of the victims. Many of them packed a courtroom for months in 2019, only to see a jury split on whether to convict Almena, who leased the building. At the same trial, the jury also found co-defendant Max Harris, who was the Ghost Ship's “creative director” and rent collector, not guilty.
Almena had been jailed since 2017 until he was released in May because of coronavirus concerns and after posting a $150,000 bail bond. He is currently on house arrest with an ankle monitor in the city of Upper Lake, where he lives with his wife and children.
Colleen Dolan, mother of fire victim Chelsea Faith Dolan, said that victims' families were only very recently informed of the plea deal possibility, and called the sentence much too light.
"I was far more emotional than I thought I would be," she said of the hearing. "We had to listen to each of the names read aloud, and then each name was followed by the word 'guilty,'" she said. "My Chelsea Faith Dolan was number 16 and when her name was read aloud, I couldn't help it. I mean, the tears just started falling. I didn't know I would feel as strongly as I did, but because of this feeble plea bargain, all of that sorrow has been dredged up again."
Almena, she said, gets to carry out his sentence at home with his family.
"He can write or draw, you know, whatever he likes to do in a quiet retreat," she said. "While we continue to mourn the loss of, you know, for me, my child, for others, their friends or their spouses. It isn't just. It isn't right."
David Bernbaum, whose brother Jonathan was killed in the fire, said he received news of the plea deal with very mixed emotions.
"On the one hand, I have so much anger towards him and his narcissism and his sociopathy. There's so much that I'll never forgive him for," Bernbaum said. "On the other hand, being in the community of people that live in really marginalized and often trivialized and sometimes persecuted situations, it's really hard for me to be excited about anybody going to prison."
Many people see Almena as a "monster," and for good reason, Bernbaum said.
"It seems the fire that our family and friends perished in was an inevitable product of a person with so much disregard for the safety needs of those around him," he said.
But looking beyond just Almena, he said, this crisis was in many ways a cruel and avoidable repercussion of the Bay Area's housing crisis.
"A monster needs a weakness to take advantage of, and that weakness, and his ability to prey on people who wanted the kind of community that he was offering — that was built on a foundation that was literally on fire — all of that was a powerful [symbol] of the affordable housing crisis that the Bay Area has been experiencing," Bernbaum said.
"If people that were part of the underground or part of the arts community weren't so desperate for a place to live and to congregate in and to create and to have parties, then we wouldn't have found our friends going and knocking on the door of somebody that everyone knew was an unstable monster."
KQED's Erin Baldassari and the Associated Press's Daisy Nguyen contributed to this story.
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