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On August 5, 1989, a family’s car broke down outside of Stockton, approximately 80 miles from San Mateo County. Nearby, the family found an old army jacket. Poking around in the jacket they found a videotape, a single glove, and some possible black magic paraphernalia – including a ceramic replica of a human skull. The family left everything in place except for the videotape, which they took along with them.
When they later watched the tape at home, they found it recorded a house burning down and an eerie voice narrating the fire: “…ancient spirit of evil…Omar…the fire department is trying to put it out…what a laugh…I said I’ll do it! I said I’ll do it!”
But there was no clue as to where the fire was or when it had been filmed. The local law enforcement couldn’t match the image to any fires in recent history.
The case quickly going cold, law enforcement turned to the media and on September 19, 1990, the television show Unsolved Mysteries broadcast footage from the videotape and asked viewers to call in if they believed they knew the location of the burning house. Alert viewers quickly identified the video as capturing the August 15, 1988 burning of an unfinished house on Colton Court in Redwood City.
Armed with that information, Redwood City police were able to quickly identify the culprits and arrest two youths: a 17-year-old Woodside resident and a 19-year-old Redwood City resident. The older teen confessed to filming the Colton Court fire and being the voice on the tape. Other videotapes linked him to 27 fires throughout the county in the previous two years.
Due to their ages, they were both tried as minors and so their names and many legal documents were never released to the public. It is known that in the end one of them went to a juvenile detention facility and the other spent time in an inpatient psychiatric residence.
I still have questions about this one. Who was Omar? Was there Satanic activity going on here? How did these items get to a deserted roadside near Stockton, 80 miles away from Redwood City – one year after the actual fire? What was their motive for the fires in the first place? Have they committed crimes since their releases?
Due to the anonymity of the two perpetrators, we may never find out all of the particulars behind these crimes.
