SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Four and a half years after a mass shooting, the tiny Northern California community of Rancho Tehama has been hit with one of the first significant wildfires of 2022.
The Rancho fire has burned 700 acres in the rural Tehama County community as of Tuesday, destroying 10 buildings and threatening 158 others, according to Cal Fire.
Officials ordered evacuations on Rancho Tehama Road, Stagecoach Road, Oakridge Road and Apache Trail.
The cause of the fire was under investigation. Early Tuesday, Cal Fire spokesman Chris Bruno said the fire was 30% contained and “forward progress has stopped.”
Few Californians had heard of Rancho Tehama, a struggling blue-collar community of about 2,000 people west of Interstate 5, until Nov. 14, 2017. That’s when an apparently deranged resident named Kevin Janson Neal shot his wife and four other people to death before killing himself during an encounter with law enforcement.
Before he died, he sprayed the outside of Rancho Tehama Elementary School with bullets but none of the students or teachers were injured.
Neighbors told The Sacramento Bee afterward that Neal had terrorized them for months, firing guns in the air and threatening them with harm, convinced that some of them were running meth labs on their property. He killed his wife Barbara first, burying her body beneath the floorboards of their home, before beginning his killing spree.
Authorities said Neal was armed with two weapons, including an illegally modified Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle, out of mail-order parts. Several of the survivors of the shooting filed a lawsuit three years later against the “ghost gun” industry, the suppliers of parts and kits to those who make and modify their weapons themselves.
After the shooting, residents of Rancho Tehama told The Bee that Tehama County sheriff’s deputies ignored their pleas for help in the months leading up to the bloodbath. At one point, Neal stabbed one of his neighbors, and deputies seized his rifle, but the criminal case against him was dismissed.
After the stabbing, a judge granted the restraining order, mandating Neal relinquish any weapons. He turned in a handgun, court records show. Sheriff Dave Hencratt told The Bee after the shooting that Neal didn’t hand in his homemade rifle or his other weapons.
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