Oakland fire: Who is the man behind the ‘Ghost Ship’?

By Thomas Peele and Robert Salonga

East Bay Times

OAKLAND, Calif. — Five months before Friday’s raging fire killed at least 36 people at the “Ghost Ship” warehouse, the brainchild of the cluttered artists’ cooperative took to Facebook in a 1,000-word rant claiming he was “the thriller love child of Manson, Pol Pot and Hitler.”

There was little sense to the bizarre writing of Derick Ion Almena, 46, known as a passionate artist from Los Angeles devoted to an alternative way of life who led the Oakland arts collective and commune with a distorted sense of reality. But he ended his writing with incredibly haunting words: “I can proverbally (sic) get away with murder.”

The warehouse had been rented for a dance party, Almena apparently wasn’t at the property Friday night, and no one has accused him of directly causing the fire. He does not own the structure. Police won’t say if they have questioned him — or anyone — but District Attorney Nancy O’Malley has opened a criminal investigation into the blaze at the facility, which wasn’t permitted for parties or residential living.

Almena’s name came up in discussions before the probe was announced, a law enforcement source close to the investigation told the Bay Area News Group. Attention has focused on the man behind the “Ghost Ship,” whom former residents and frequent visitors say was cavalier about safety hazards at the warehouse that many labeled a death trap.

Almena is no stranger to law enforcement. In January 2015, he pleaded no contest in Alameda County to a misdemeanor charge of receiving stolen property after negotiating a plea deal that saved him from facing a felony. He is on probation until 2019. Online records show his criminal history also includes an unspecified arrest in Los Angeles County. Efforts to reach Almena — whom people had identified Saturday as Derick Alemany — at addresses affiliated with him in Oakland have been unsuccessful.

Shortly after the blaze, he became a central figure of public outrage about the fire when he failed to mention the victims in a post on Facebook, lamenting his own loss: “Everything I worked so hard for is gone.”

A disturbing picture of Almena quickly emerged on social media and in interviews with people who know him; many skewered him as selfish and careless and for next-level narcissism, but some celebrated his unyielding quirky vibe. A deeper look into Almena’s past shows a man who sought to desperately defy convention in his art, work and life.

“This is NOT a nite club,” he wrote in a 2012 Facebook post about an event he promoted at Cloud 9 in Berkeley. “You will not be asked to leave at 2 am. You will not be subjected to plastic falsely proud deejays subjecting you to manufactured soul-less beats. You will be in the house of a living temple. Surrounded by magnificent Alters, Antique furniture, Balinese beds, Persian rugs, organic food and drink.”

A former neighbor from when Almena lived in the Oakland hills in the earlier part of the decade said he elicited suspicion from many in the calm hillside neighborhood.

Jurgen Braunngardt, the neighbor, said cars came and went from Almena’s home frequently at night, fueling suspicions. Almena was eccentric, the neighbor said, describing him as having “a way about him like he was founding a new religion. … I felt sorry about his wife and the people around him. It’s a tragedy.”

Almena and his wife, Micah Allison, and their three young children eventually moved into the Ghost Ship but were not there Friday night. The warehouse had been rented out for an underground dance party, as it often has been, and the couple spent the night at a hotel.

Danielle Boudreaux, a former friend of the couple, told the Associated Press she had a falling out with Almena when she persuaded Allison’s parents and sister about a year ago that the warehouse was a dangerous place for the couple’s three children to live.

“Oh my God, the children,” Allison’s relative Claudette Selvin, of Gardena, said Sunday upon hearing about the fire but learning the children were safe.

Almena’s Facebook posts, under the account Derick Ion, hinted at what some described as his growing instability. Others say drug use was widespread at the warehouse.

“Addictions never admitted armed me as revolutionary,” he wrote. “… as long as i seek help and healing, have current registration, pay my insurance, p — in a cup twice weekly … i can proverbally (sic) get away with murder.”

The couple didn’t own the Ghost Ship; they leased it from an Oakland landlord and lived at the warehouse, welcoming others to live and work in the building for $300 to $600 a month, according to interviews with former tenants.

Shelley Mack lived at the warehouse for a few months in 2014-15 and described Almena as gypsy-like, often spinning tales and writing poetry. But Mack said he was alarmed by the hazardous living conditions, questionable electrical hookups, artists using butane torches and by the propane tanks used to heat the showers upstairs.

“He knew all of it,” Mack said. “We argued a lot. They said they would fix things, and then they would collect money. They never would use the money to fix things.”

Oakland building inspectors were familiar with the property and had visited the site just last month after a complaint, but they couldn’t get inside.

Almena had converted the two-story space into a Burning Man-style arts collective and commune in Oakland’s Fruitvale district, cluttered with Persian rugs, dozens of pianos and a gangplank-style staircase to the second floor, where many of the victims of Friday’s fire were trapped.

Nikki Kelber, 44, a jewelry maker who lived in the Ghost Ship and narrowly escaped the fire with her cat, said Almena is being unfairly blamed for the fire.

“Their sole purpose was to create a space where artists could survive and thrive,” she said. “To point fingers at them is unfair. They are not bad people by any stretch of the imagination.”

While Almena’s building was known as the Ghost Ship, he had named the arts collective Satya Yuga, which in Hinduism refers to an initial golden age marked by knowledge, meditation, repentance and good deeds.

One poster on Facebook described how the “inside of the warehouse looked like his mind … beautifully exotic and creative, but with sharp edges, dangerous corners, hazardous materials and twisting turning darkness.”

“I’ve had years of being in community and hearing people have dangerous encounters with him. … All the Balinese art that’s inside is his. Same for the antiques. Same for the wooden boards and nails jutting out at all angles. Same for the mushroom infested furniture,” the Facebook poster said. “It’s his design. There wasn’t any interest in making the space be safe for people. And since so many people didn’t want to deal with him due to the trauma they went through, they stayed away.”

Alexander Dore, another former resident, fondly described the warehouse on Facebook as “a collective, a commune, a temple, a home, a place to run free stoned naked without fear, it was a sacred space that wasn’t owned by the government.”

But now, Dore wrote, it is a “mausoleum for the dead.”