Firefighters douse a three-alarm blaze at Dogz Bar and Grill in Belmont Shore on June 12, 2018. Investigators later said Snapchat helped them track down three teens suspected of arson. Photo courtesy the Long Beach Fire Department.
Firefighters douse a three-alarm blaze at Dogz Bar and Grill in Belmont Shore on June 12, 2018. Investigators later said Snapchat helped them track down three teens suspected of arson. Photo courtesy the Long Beach Fire Department.

One of the three 14-year-olds accused of starting a string of fires around Belmont Shore—including one that gutted a popular Second Street bar—was arrested a second time earlier this month when he posted Snapchat videos of himself flaunting $100 bills after cashing a check that investigators suspect was fraudulent, court documents show.

The boy is now in juvenile hall waiting to face arson and fraud charges, according to his grandmother, who argues that authorities have blown the situation out of proportion. She said her grandson is a victim: He succumbed to peer pressure from another teenager who was a ringleader in the fires and then was fooled by an online scammer who tricked him into depositing a bad check.

“He made a mistake. He knows he made a mistake, but he’s not this horrible menace to society,” she said.

The Post typically does not name minors accused of crimes and is withholding the grandmother’s name as well to avoid identifying the 14-year-old.

The boy was first arrested on June 16 after videos surfaced that allegedly link him and two other 14-year-olds to a string of arsons on June 12. Most of the fires were small, but one blaze left a firefighter with second-degree burns and caused at least $140,000 worth of damage to Dogz Bar and Grill in Belmont Shore, court papers show.

The boys posted videos showing themselves in the area of the fires when they started around 5 a.m., including a shot with flames in the background, according to a pair of search warrants filed in Long Beach Superior Court.

“The use of social media, Snap Inc. to be specific, played a large part in tracking the suspects based off of a GPS mapping tool associated with the phone app,” Long Beach Fire Department Arson Investigator Tye Johnson wrote in one warrant. Snap Inc. is the parent company of the social media app Snapchat.

Johnson wrote that authorities eventually swooped in and arrested two of the boys moments after they posted another video of themselves together in Belmont Shore. The third teen, who’d already been identified from the videos by staff at Wilson High School, was also arrested, Johnson wrote.

After being booked into juvenile hall, they were released days later with GPS monitors, according to one of the warrants.

Johnson wrote he continued to monitor Snapchat, and on July 6, he saw one of the boys post a video of a $2,950 check from a Chatsworth-based media company.

In followup videos, the boy cashes the check at a bank and then shows off the resulting $100 bills, according to Johnson.

When Johnson contacted the company named on the check, he discovered it was fake, he wrote in one of the warrants.

On July 18, a fire investigator and two police officers showed up to arrest the boy at his grandmother’s shorefront home on the Peninsula where he’d been staying on house arrest, according to the grandmother.

The warrant says authorities also seized a handful of electronics, three Gucci watches, a Louis Vuitton wallet and another check they suspect is fraudulent.

The grandmother accused fire investigators of trolling her grandson’s social media. Authorities forbade the boy from using Snapchat during his house arrest, she said, but other than violating that rule, he’d been complying with their conditions, which included frequently checking in with his probation officer any time he left home for classes, a haircut or to see his emotional therapy dog.

She said her grandson thought the bad checks were legitimate. He’d found work online posting real estate ads and job listings on Craigslist and other sites, she said.

When he got the checks as payment, she helped him cash one of them, she said.

“I was naive,” she said. “He was naive.”

After they cashed the check, the person who’d sent it called to say he’d overpaid and asked them to send some of the money back, according to the grandmother.

“There’s the big red flag,” she said.

Jeremiah Dobruck is managing editor of the Long Beach Post. Reach him at [email protected] or @jeremiahdobruck on Twitter.