A Shasta County judge ruled on Tuesday that a Palo Alto woman accused of causing the Fawn Fire in September was mentally unfit to stand trial.
31-year-old Alexandra Souverneva was accused of causing a fire in a woodland north of Reading, injuring three firefighters, destroying 185 buildings and scorching more than 8,500 acres of land.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Souverneva graduated from California Institute of Technology with a bachelor's degree in chemistry and biology in 2012, and worked as a chemical research assistant at a Bay Area company from 2016 to 2019.
In September, she was arrested and charged with arson related to wildfires.
Briona Haney, a spokesperson for the Shasta County District Attorney's Office, said that on Tuesday, Judge Adam Ryan ruled that Souverneva was mentally incapacitated to accept trial and shelved the prosecution indefinitely.
According to the ruling. Souverneva was unable to help her lawyer to defend because she did not understand the court process.
Last month, the judge ordered two psychologists to evaluate Souverneva's mental health. According to the district attorney's office, both believed that she was incapable of being tried.
Souverneva's defense attorney Gregg Cohen initially expressed doubts about the abilities of his client.
Souverneva will now be evaluated and placed in a state psychiatric hospital, where she will receive treatment, and may announce that she is capable of trial in the future.
Cohen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Assistant District Attorney Chris Knight of Monterey County said that Suvineva was also charged with a felony arson in Monterey County in connection with the August 8 fire.
According to a criminal lawsuit, Souverneva claimed that on September 22, the day the fire started, she tried to boil a stream contaminated with bear urine.
According to court records, she told investigators from the California Forestry and Fire Department that she felt thirsty when she traveled to Canada and found a puddle of water near a dry river bed.
She said that after she tried to filter the liquid with tea bags, she tried to make a fire and boil water.
She told the authorities that she drank the water and walked up the mountain until she saw smoke and "the plane dropped pink things", and then contacted the fire department.
The quarry workers reported that they saw a woman who fit Souverneva's description "behaving abnormally" near the fire site.
Court documents show that the woman continued to walk east into the vegetation, leaving two carbon dioxide boxes and a battery on a dirt road.
Later that night, fire officials found Souverneva while fighting the growing fire and assessed whether she might be dehydrated.
According to California firefighter Matt Alexander, she was carrying a lighter and a "pink and white item that contained green leaf substances that she admitted to smoking that day."
According to the criminal lawsuit, she also carried a carbon dioxide box matching the carbon dioxide box found near the quarry.
According to her LinkedIn, after graduating from Palo Alto High School in 2009, Souverneva worked as a research assistant and teaching assistant while studying at the California Institute of Technology, and also wrote articles for the school newspaper.
From 2014 to 2015, he was a PhD student in Environmental Chemistry at the School of Environmental Science and Forestry, State University of New York.
From 2016 to 2019, she worked as a chemical research assistant at Nanosyn in Santa Clara and then as a medicinal chemistry research assistant at Gilead Sciences in Foster City for eight months.
Souverneva is not the first Bay Area resident with academic connections to be accused of causing wildfires this year.
Former college teacher Gary Stephen Maynard is accused of a series of arson in federal woodlands, including near the place where a large-scale Dixie fire broke out in Northern California.
According to reports, Maynard has worked at several universities in California, including Santa Clara University.
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Nathan Solis is a subway reporter who covers breaking news in the Los Angeles Times. He previously worked for the court news agency, where he wrote breaking news and corporate stories, from criminal justice to homelessness and politics. Prior to this, Solis worked as a multimedia reporter at Redding Record Searchlight, where he hosted a report on the devastating fire in Northern California in 2017. Early in his career, he worked at Eastsider LA
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