SAN JOSE — A San Jose State University student has been arrested and charged with arson on allegations he set two trash can fires about a week apart inside occupied restrooms in the campus library, according to authorities and court records.
The college sophomore was arrested Wednesday and booked into the Elmwood men’s jail on suspicion of four counts of arson, and was initially held in lieu of $400,000 bail. But at his arraignment Friday, Judge Hector Ramon placed him on house arrest at his parents’ Dublin residence with an ankle monitor and ordered him to undergo court-order psychological counseling.
Ramon also ordered that the student stay at least 300 yards away from university property — including facilities in and around Spartan Stadium — and barred him from possessing any materials that could be used to make a fire.
Cal Fire, which dispatched its Office of the State Fire Marshal to investigate the fires alongside university police, announced the arrest Friday.
The state firefighting agency issued a bulletin Tuesday — the day before the arrest — seeking public help identifying a person recorded by a security camera entering a restroom inside the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library around the time of the first reported fire on March 31.
That trash can fire, believed to have been intentionally set, occurred in a seventh-floor men’s restroom and was extinguished before causing any serious damage, police said. A second fire under similar circumstances was reported April 8 in a men’s restroom on the eighth floor.
Cal Fire stated Friday that the restrooms were occupied when the fires were set.
Anyone with information for investigators can contact the Cal Fire Arson and Bomb Unit at 213-302-5855 or arsonbomb@fire.ca.gov.
