Police in Sacramento County have launched an investigation into a fire that destroyed a house in Antelope, California, that was being fought over by the owner and a group of squatters. The home at the 4500 block of Country Run Way in Antelope, a suburb of Sacramento, burned down around 10 a.m. local time on Wednesday, local news media reported. Metro Fire of Sacramento published a video of the fire on X , formerly known as Twitter , writing that crews were dispatched to the location at 10:34 a.m., and found two properties engulfed in flames "with the additional complexity of an altercation between residents." The footage shows a raging fire burning one of the homes and thick black smoke rising a few meters above the property. Firefighters said the blaze started in the garage of one of the homes and quickly spread because of the vast amount of combustible items stored in it, CBS reported. According to Metro Fire of Sacramento, sheriff's deputies intervened to stop a fight between residents, which they said had no impact on the work of fire crews. The Sacramento County Sheriff's Office said the argument was about the fire and a squatter at the house that burned down had a knife cut that occurred during the fight. Two people involved in the altercation were detained. Newsweek contacted the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office for comment by email on Thursday. All of the residents made it out safely, but the two homes were badly damaged in the fire. The footage shows that one of the homes—the one where the fire started—was burned to the ground, with barely three walls left standing. The incident is being investigated as arson. According to ABC 10, the house where the fire started had been occupied by squatters for the past two years. The homeowner's son told the news site that they were taking legal action to get the squatters removed. While squatting incidents have recently been given a boost in visibility in the media, there is no official data on squatting that can tell us if the phenomenon is on the rise or not. The term squatting specifically refers to someone occupying a property illegally and without the owners' permission, but it's often used to refer to people who at a certain point were given permission to live on a property as tenants or licensees, but later entered into disputes with the property's owners. Technically, these people are not squatters. It's unclear what was the status of the squatters in the home in Antelope, California, affected by the fire. Squatters in the Golden State can claim ownership of a property after having lived there continuously for five years, as long as they have paid property taxes in this same period. Squatters also must have made improvements to the property, and the owner must have known of their presence and not made an effort to evict them.
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