Action Heroes: How Actor Brian J. White & His Neighbors Tackled Suspected Arsonist During Kenneth Fire

deadline.com:

Actor Brian J. White became an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances Thursday when he, along with several of his neighbors, apprehended an arson suspect with a blowtorch in Woodland Hills, making a citizen arrest until the police got there.

He shared the harrowing experience with Deadline, spoke how the police work and fight training for roles helped him in the ordeal and what the reaction has been from his colleagues, including the cast of Criminal Minds: Evolution where he is recurring, to seeing him in a viral cell video of the incident shot by White’s wife, Paula Da Silva, and their next-door neighbor.

Like others in the path of the Kenneth Fire, which broke out in the neighboring West Hills Thursday afternoon, the Whites got the emergency alert to get ready to potentially evacuate.

By then, they had started to see the blaze from their house, “so we were just all very nervous that the fires were getting close,” White recalls. “We were packing up, and all of a sudden, out front of our house, I hear screaming, ‘Put it down, put it down,'” White says. “I thought somebody had a gun and my neighbor was in duress, so my daughter went and hid in the closet, and I went running upstairs to go outside and help my neighbor.” Standing on the lawn of the house next door was a neighbor from down the block telling a man holding a blowtorch to put it down after seeing him trying to ignite Whites’ trash on fire which had leaves, sticks and other flammable items in it. (The neighbor had seen the stranger on a bike try to light an old Christmas tree in the trash on his street about 20 min prior and chased after him, first on foot and then in his car, catching up with him at White’s house.) Joined by a third neighbor, White