FBI now involved in Yermo fire investigation

Clarification : The story has incorrectly described the level of involvement of the FBI in the death investigation of Imam Ali Mohammed.

The FBI is in contact with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department regarding the death of Mohammed, but is not directly investigating the case, according to FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller. Eimiller said the FBI contacted the sheriff’s department after receiving a call from Mohammed’s family. She said that if the sheriff’s department determines that Mohammed was a victim of a crime the FBI will join the investigation.

YERMO • The FBI is investigating the death of Ali Mohammed whose body was found inside a burned home in Yermo.

Agency spokeswoman Laura Eimiller says agents are working with local authorities to determine whether a crime had been committed and, if so, whether it was a hate crime.

The recently-released autopsy report of Mohammed, a landlord who was killed in the house fire, may bring investigators another step closer to piecing together the events surrounding the 51-year-old man’s death. The official cause of Mohammed’s death was due to fire burns with “inhalation of products of combustion,” according to Deputy Coroner Investigator Pamela Sokolik.

The coroner’s office is still waiting for results from toxicology tests, Sokolik said, noting that the tests are standard procedure.

The coroner’s office also identified Mohammed for the first time. While the autopsy was completed Thursday, the coroner’s office waited until Friday for a forensic dentist to officially identify the remains, according to Sokolik, although the family had identified Mohammed to law enforcement officials several days earlier.

Mohammed was killed on June 27 when his house on East Yermo Road went up in flames.

A loud explosion rung out around the same time neighbors first noticed the fire, said several residents in the area.

According to Arden Wiltshire, spokeswoman for San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, the arson investigation unit has yet to determine the cause of the fire and expects the investigation to take “several weeks.”

Currently, detectives from the homicide unit are not involved in the investigation, Wiltshire said.

Jordan Mohammed, Ali’s 21-year-old son, provided the sheriff’s deputies with photographs of racist vandalism that his father discovered inside the family’s house and photographed two days before the fire. The vandalism included racial epithets — including phrases laced with profanity that singled out the family’s Middle Eastern ethnicity — as well as Nazi and American symbols.

Wiltshire said that investigators are including the photographs as a part of the investigation.

“When they put all of the pieces of the puzzle together, that’s when we’ll have a better idea of what the outcome of the investigation will be,” she said. “But right now, what the family is providing is one or two pieces of the overall puzzle.”

The family held Mohammed’s funeral — a traditional Muslim funeral service — at the American Islamic Institute of Antelope Valley near Palmdale on Monday evening, according to Jordan.

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(760) 256-4122 or elee@desertdispatch.com