Man seen on video lighting ‘Trump Won’ yard sign on fire will be charged, Wake DA says

A man seen in home surveillance footage lighting a political yard sign on fire last week will face misdemeanor criminal charges, Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said Monday.

Local GOP activist and businessman John Kane posted the footage on social media, which showed a man cycling past his house stopping by the sign, which read “Trump Won,” and trying to take it down. An initial video showed that man kicking the sign, while subsequent videos showed what appears to be the same man lighting the original sign and a replacement on fire.

Kane is the son of a Raleigh real estate developer of the same name.

Freeman told The News & Observer on Monday evening that her office was in the process of serving the man seen in the video with two counts of misdemeanor injury to real property. A spokesperson for the Raleigh Police Department said earlier on Monday that it was aware of the incidents and was investigating them.

Freeman said she couldn’t identify the man being charged until the charges have been served. The News & Observer wasn’t able to independently verify the man’s identity.

Kane initially posted a video from his Nest security camera on Aug. 12, which showed a man approaching the sign on his bike and trying to kick it down. When he failed to break or dislodge the sign, the video showed, the man left the area.

Less than a week later, Kane’s camera captured what appears to be the same man returning to his home twice more, early on the mornings of Aug. 15 and Aug. 18. On both of those instances, the camera footage shows the man getting off his bike and setting the sign on fire with a lighter. After the man burned down the first sign, Kane replaced it with another, which was also set on fire on Aug. 18.

When Kane posted a video with all three clips on Twitter offering a $1,000 reward to anyone who could help identify the man, the video quickly spread across the platform, being shared more than 1,000 times and viewed 395,000 times. Conservative commentators Benny Johnson and Tim Pool each offered additional rewards of $5,000.

By Sunday evening, Kane wrote on Twitter that a man from Lodi, California, who didn’t want his name shared had reached out to Kane’s attorney with a name for the cyclist, which he matched to the incidents by comparing the time stamps in the videos to time stamps on maps of the man’s cycling route recorded on Strava, an app used by cyclists.

In that same post, Kane said his lawyer was preparing a civil lawsuit against the man they believed had set his signs on fire, which Kane’s attorney filed in Wake County Superior Court on Monday. Kane also said he shared the video footage with Raleigh police.

The lawsuit states the man identified by Kane “chose to literally start a fire on John’s property and destroy his political adversary’s property,” and seeks damages for counts including trespass to land, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and invasion of privacy.

In a video posted on Monday, Kane noted that the sign is installed on his front yard, and said he wondered if the flames from the sign could’ve spread to the rest of his lawn and trees on his property, endangering his family sleeping inside during both of the early-morning incidents, if it weren’t for a steel frame he attached to the sign.

“This is not OK in America. I don’t care who you support politically, none of us can accept a country where someone can be so triggered by someone’s support of a majority party political candidate, that they come and commit premeditated arson on their home — really in an attempt to kill them,” Kane said.