Witnessed: Fade to Black - The Arsonist Next Door | 3: The Big Scoop

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

A rogue arsonist meets with a local journalist in broad daylight. He says he’s working with a group of vigilante environmentalists who are just getting started. Binge all episodes of The Arsonist Next Door, ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. From serial killer nurses to psychic scammers – The Binge is your home for true crime stories that pull you in and never let go. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. A Sony Music Entertainment and Novel production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The Binch. Feed your true crime obsession. The Binge. Novel. In January of 2001, James Hibbard is 28 years old. reporter at the Phoenix New Times, an alternative weekly newspaper. He's sitting in a conference room attached to a bustling newsroom, surrounded by editors and senior staff.

If you're picturing something like from a movie where everyone kind of gathers in an office and they shut the door and hunker over this letter like it's from the Zodiac Killer, that's pretty much what it was like. They're crowded around a table, reading a letter. At the top of the letter was, Thou shall not desecrate God's creation. It's the same greeting that CSP, the Coalition to Save the Preserves,

has used to open some of their threatening letters left at the arson sites. But this one is addressed directly to James. And in the letter he talked about trying to call the new times after reading Burn Baby Burn, and he couldn't get through. James recently published an article about the arsons with the headline Burn Baby Burn, and it's caught the attention of CSP. The letter ends with a peculiar sign-off. In like a ghost, out like a ghost, happy hunting.

It felt a bit unreal. James's boss outlines their next mission. Let's get this motherfucker on the phone. From Sony Music Entertainment and novel, I'm Sam Anderson. You're listening to The Arsonist Next Door. Episode 3, The Big School. To understand how James Haberd found himself in that conference room, surrounded by editors holding a letter from a self. self-avowed arsonist group, you have to understand a little bit about the Phoenix New Times and what it was like to work there.

We're a liberal, go fuck yourself. That was the vibe. That's how James describes the culture of the paper in the early 2000s. It was a bit of a rabble-rousing, controversial paper. It was like this counterweight to the city's conservative daily paper, the Arizona Republic. It was popular with the more left-leaning types in Phoenix. I remember being at a party when I first moved there and I was trying to make friends and I struck up a conversation with this guy and when he found out where I worked,

he was like, oh, that's a very liberal publication and then turned around, like, walked away. It's his first job as a reporter, and he's having a blast. He's on the counterculture beat. I covered, like, the world's loudest car radio convention or profile, a 14-year-old kid who was in a street gang, or I would do a story on the Scottsdale prostitution scene, and then do a story about this subculture where people were suspending themselves from meat hooks.

Just as James is getting into the flow of his new job, the arson spree hits the headlines. This guy was public enemy number one. He was like the roadrunner zipping around the Arizona desert. By this time, there's a 40-person multi-agency task force with millions of dollars. at their disposal. They're conducting mass surveillance, the preserves are crawling with undercover agents. And yet, these houses are still going up in flames.

And the only evidence they've got are a couple of notes, just taunting them. The arsonists had already been covered, like in the daily paper and the other publications a ton. Everyone is reporting the story. But the New Times editors are looking to stir things up with a different angle. And that angle is that maybe these CSP guys,

have a point. The editors had the idea of, let's do a story about how some people were rooting for this guy like a folk hero, something different than the coverage that had been out there. And who better to take that task on than their resident counterculture reporter, James Hibbard. I remember being only mildly interested. But that's kind of irrelevant, because if he doesn't write it, he'll have to contend with chief editor, Mike Lacey. This guy was the scariest editor I ever knew.

To paint you a picture, Lacey Scott Holdfast, tattooed on his knuckles. When this guy looked at you with his icy blue eyes, you're like, has this guy ever killed somebody and gotten away with it? Maybe. So whether James likes it or not, he's got this new assignment. Go forth and find out how the City of Phoenix really feels about the arson spree. James quickly discovers that the arsonist isn't the only one who's pissed off about urban sprawl. Rival newspaper, the Arizona Republic, used the phrase, an acre, an hour,

to describe how fast the city was eating the desert. A lot of the people James talks to are angry about it. He digs up some numbers, showing how Arizona developers outspent their opponents five to one to destroy a bill that would have capped growth. And he references the members of Earth Liberation Front, who are using arson to wage a war against sprawl all across America in Indiana, Colorado, and New York. The ELF and CSP are both targeting unfinished luxury homes that are encroaching on environmentally sensitive areas. Could they be two parts of the same group? CSP and ELF both say they are nonviolent, and it's true that no one has died so far.

But that's down to pure luck. It's a well-rounded article that gives fair play to all sides of the debate. But it does include a few provocative lines, including this one. The meticulously executed attacks, impassioned ideological messages, and comically baffled collection of law enforcement officials are almost enough to make you root for the arsonist. To be clear, James does not support arson. No, I don't think setting fires is an okay way

to protest Bourbon sprawl. Or really, anything for that matter. If your argument requires you to blow up something to make your point, how good is your argument really? When the article is published on January 11, 2001, the front page of the New Times is covered with a splashy photo of a mansion going up in flames. The way it's presented seems intended to do one thing.

Piss off the establishment. We got a few angry letters, a few angry calls. That wasn't seemingly a big deal until we got the letter from the arsonist. A letter signed CSP. That's how James finds himself crammed into that conference room of the New Times, with a bunch of senior editors brainstorming their next move. The supposed arsonist seems to be a fan of James' article. He said he liked the story.

He was complaining about some of the other media coverage. What the editor, Mike Lacey, wants now, is for James. to get in touch with this letter writer and land an exclusive interview. Now, a lot of news organizations out there if they got a letter from a purported arsonist would probably contact the police. But this is no ordinary paper

and the Phoenix New Times is not about to give up the story. They saw an opportunity to get unprecedented insight into these fires, which was inherently newsworthy. This was, for that city at that time, a scoop as big as they came. But there's a problem. The letter writer, for obvious reasons, hasn't left a return address,

so they have no way to write back. Lacey's got a plan for that, too. He came up with the idea of putting my office phone number on the cover of next week's issue, along with the message, to Thou Shall Not. A direct quote from the letter. CSP's favorite line hasn't been released to the public, by police or journalists.

So the editor's figure only the letter writer will understand the message they're sending back. We ran the message in this little box at the top corner of the cover. The next day, the calls start pouring in. At first, it's just random readers, curious about why a phone number was printed on the front page. I would explain it by saying things like, oh, it's just a typo, even though that doesn't make any sense. And then I got the call. he said, I got your message.

James sits bolt upright in his chair. That was when I started to realize this is turning into a big deal. It was very weird. He seemed super casual, like just kind of in a good mood and chatty, but also arrogant and high in his own supply. He sounded like a youngish to middle, lower middle age, business professional. He sounded like a guy on his lunch hour at an office. just chatting about the weather. The man on the phone is preoccupied with the media coverage the arson spree is getting.

He's concerned about certain assumptions that are being made about the group responsible. He wanted to set the record straight, and he also said, and this will be important later, that a North Phoenix Preserve unit was forming in his group. The letter writer insists that the Coalition to Save the Preserves is a group, and they're organized enough to have different units. units. And then he offered an in-person interview. Here are the conditions. Be at Patriot Square Park, downtown Phoenix, 11 a.m. in two days. No tape recorders, no photographers, come alone, sit anywhere, and read a copy of the Burn Baby Burn story. And then we'll see what

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dot com slash crimes it's a beautiful sunny day in downtown phoenix james is sitting in a little plaza in patriot square park which is basically the center of downtown it's full of trees and benches and office workers on their lunch break eating sandwiches and sioux lates. There's a stage where a band is prepping to play. And right across the street is the Maricopa County Superior Courthouse. There are cops all over. There are media news trucks parked along the street. It's kind of the last place in the world that you'd think an arsonist, who's the target of a citywide manhunt, would want to meet. Permi thought that if he did show up,

that the cops would swoop in and arrest us both. James is sitting on a park bench. In his hands, a copy of his article, Burn Baby Burn. It's not like I showed up packing a weapon or anything crazy. I just went there, opened the copy of the paper like he asked, and waited. Are you scared? I was more excited than nervous. I was bummed. I wouldn't have a tape recorder because I'd have to be writing in longhand and scribbling all the answers.

But James knows exactly what he wants to find out. How he was getting away with this and why he was doing this. And of course, the biggest question, Who is this guy? Did the legendary Lacey give you any sage advice before you embarked on this journalistic mission? No, no. I mean, now that you're mentioning it,

they probably should have instead of shoving their youngest reporter out into the middle of a park to meet with an arsonist. In my first journalism job, I was interviewing elementary school teachers in New Jersey for the Teacher of the Year Award. Can you imagine interviewing a serial arsonist who's basically on his way to becoming the FBI's most wanted,

I would be terrified. There is definitely that heightened feeling and I was also skeptical that he'd actually show up. All of a sudden, this guy comes up and sits next to me. He's got these big Bono sunglasses on, hat on, track suit on. It's not exactly the outfit you'd expect from an eco-warier. You picture somebody who's like young and scruff. and looks like they were living out of a van.

This guy is tall, middle-aged, and athletic. He was very energetic, almost wired, and he asked whether I had seen the paper that morning. In the paper that morning, another arson attack. The eighth fire that CSP has claimed responsibility for. This time, in North Phoenix. Then I remembered that on the phone call, he had teased that a North Phoenix unit of his move,

was forming. James is shook, but there's still a chance the guy sitting next to him could be a fraud. That's when the man drops some very specific information that only someone who set this latest fire could know. The guy said, you know, call rural metro and ask about the two notes that were left behind that hadn't been reported yet. The man is telling James to call the local police precinct and ask about the latest CSP notes left at the scene of last night's fire. fire, notes that nobody else would know about since they haven't been reported in the news. And he also said the timing of the fire was not coincidental. The arsonist tells James that the Coalition to Save the Preserves got together to discuss meeting with him.

He said, you know, we thought that setting that fire would be a good faith effort to establish our credibility. In other words, the group lit this fire to prove to James they were the real deal. That hit hard. It was like everything swoons for a moment. I didn't really know what to do with it, so I just got to work asking questions instead. He's doing a lot of the talk initially. He kept using the word they.

He said that they're a group of four of them. And did you think that this is someone from an environmental, radical group? I remember not being sure. The man is eager to convince James that CSP is not out to hurt anyone. He talked about how he set the fires. He would say details like how he would wait for a calm night with no gusting winds, how they prayed before each fire, how they didn't want firefighters to be hurt. This whole thing sounds kind of absurd.

Obviously, once a house starts burning, there's no way to control it. I noticed that he didn't use the word arson. He always called it like activities. As they continue to talk, the band setting up on the Patriot Park stage begins to play. He starts like grooving and enjoying the music and lecturing. If you don't look suspicious, suspicion isn't drawn to you, he said. One of our keys to success is how well we blend in. At one point, he said something like, you know, what did they expect, you know,

for me to carry an Olympic torch? he struck me as arrogant, cocky, and kind of controlling. At this point, James is pretty sure the man sitting next to him is either the arsonist or one of them. But there's one more thing he wants to know about. One question that was important to me was how he feels when he lights these fires. And the reason I wanted to know that is I want to try and get at what's driving all this really. Because he talked about the politics, but I didn't really get the sense that this guy was an eco-warier. It felt more personal.

So I asked him how he feels when he lights a fire, and he says, there's no thrill, there's some gamesmanship there, but I don't take pride in being a criminal. Well, I thought that was bullshit. So near the end of the interview, I circled back and asked the same question again, just a different way. And this time, he gave a different answer. he said fear and anticipation that's what he feels when he does this fear of being observed and then the anticipation of the media coverage and it suddenly made the location make sense he wasn't in patriot square despite the police presence he was there because of it it made it more risky more of a throne James can already imagine the last line of the article he's about to write.

In like a ghost, out like a ghost, another publicity mission accomplished. It was clear what he was doing. He's addicted to the risk in the media attention. And I want the reader to know that we also knew what he was doing. Did you feel played by him at all? Did you feel like you were one of the media puppets that he's trying to manipulate? No, because we were getting... getting this story out of it.

James gets a front-page scoop, and in the process, he's giving CSP exactly the kind of attention thereafter. When the man leaves, James has to process what just happened? I do remember sitting there on that bench after he left and just feeling the weight of the story. And I was like, you know, I was like the dog who caught the car. and the car was on fire, basically. After the interview, the real work begins.

James' editors want to publish immediately. I was a bit wary because there was still so much we didn't know. James is personally convinced that the man on the bench is the real deal. But in the journalism game, that doesn't quite cut it. The first thing to do was to make 100% sure this was the guy. First, James confirmed. that there was an arson the night before his interview, just like the man said.

Next, we called the Phoenix PD. He asks whether any notes were left at the scene of that fire. Gave him a couple of the details that he had given us that hadn't been made public. One of those details was the signature of the note. It was signed Coalition to Save the Preserve, McDowell-Sonoran Preserve Unit. That's a reference to the new North Phoenix cell of CSP.

The cops are floor. Until now, they haven't told the public what CSP stands for, let alone this new detail about another unit forming. Suddenly, our phone was blowing up from them because they were kind of freaking out and wanting to know what we're going to do. They didn't want us to run the story. When the word reaches Lieutenant Rob Handy

that the New Times has interviewed the arsonist and an article is on the way, he goes into crisis mode. I'm trying to figure out what's coming. James's interview could not be coming at a worse time for Rob and his team. The cops are out there with night vision goggles, they're chasing down leads, they're searching through trash bins, they're conducting interviews, and they still don't have anyone in custody.

And now, a 28-year-old reporter from a liberal Alt-weekly interviewed the guy they're looking for right under their noses. There was a ton of pressure. The mayor would show up at fires, the police chief is calling, the fire chief's calling. The media was calling constantly. We were working all the time, around the clock. From Rob's perspective, if someone is committing a crime, don't promote them in the media. The New Times knows the man they interviewed might not be trustworthy. And they know he's using their platform, using James, to promote his own narrative.

But it doesn't mean that a respected news outlet doesn't do that interview with somebody who is so inherently newsworthy. So you just try to provide context and trust the reader. The New Times wasn't the first news outlet that this so-called arsonist had tried to contact. Letters had arrived at other newsrooms across the city, too. And these had been promptly handed over to the police. They were checked for clues, traces of DNA, which didn't bring up any matches, and added to the pile of other letters left at the arson scenes by CSP. James and the New Times, on the other hand, bypassed this process entirely.

At the time, this was a, in our opinion, unethical and unprofessional, and this was like breaking all the rules. So as the publishing deadline approaches for James and the New Times, Phoenix PD is breathing down their necks. It's crucial that they nail the journalism and present the story as transparently as possible.

There was a sidebar to the story I felt was important, which was explaining, here's what we've been able to confirm, here's what we don't know, which is basically everything he's claiming about his biography and the group, I wanted the reader to know our source was likely to be an unreliable narrator and being transparent about everything about what we know and what we don't was the most responsible way to do it.

A week after the interview, editor Mike Lacey finally signs off on the article. Tomorrow, it will be on the front page. The night before, there was definitely a feeling of you knew it was going to be like a bomb going off. The next morning, the bomb is dropped. A simple headline, blaring from every newsstand. Exclusive interview with the preserves arsonist. It was something like, hey, I just met with the arsonist, and here's all what's going on. Remember local jogger Warren Jerims?

He's slightly misremembered the headline there. But he does remember very well how the article shocked the community. He tells me how the ripples were felt in church. Mark and I are sitting out in the pews while the choir director is leading. the youth and whatever song it is. We get there a little bit early so we can hear him sing. Usually, Warren and his buddy Mark are enraptured by the angelic voices of their daughters at choir practice.

But this particular evening, those voices reverberating through the church are the last thing on their mind. Mark, he has a copy of the New Times article with this interview. He says, look at this. We just read the whole article together. This story feels very close to home.

And it's not just because it's happening in their backyard. The police released a composite sketch of who they thought the arsonist might be. The New Times rival, the Arizona Republic, included this sketch in their paper about a week before. Mark kind of laughed and he says, hey, that looks just like you. And it did. It really did. Warren laughs off the similarity, and they continue pouring over the article. It's filled with details about the arsonist that have never before been. made public, including the meaning of that mysterious acronym, CSP.

The Coalition to Save the Preserve. And there's details about the other CSP members, too. The interview he told James, one of the group's members works at an outdoor equipment store. Another member is a woman who works in health care. A third works at a local government agency. All of them, he claims, love mountain biking. But the thing Warren's most fascinated by is the sheer brazenness. of the interview.

How could you do that? How could anybody sit down there in the middle of Phoenix, right in the downtown area with all the people around? It was so unbelievable that somebody would even do this. Everyone I spoke to in Phoenix

remembered exactly where they were when they first read the article. New Times used to have free newspapers at the hospital, and so I was reading it at work, and everybody was very angry. Danielle Sink's home was burned to the ground, just a couple weeks earlier, leaving behind nothing but a tiny Santa Claus charged to a crisp. The way the person they interviewed talked about it, he just sounded so self-important and proud of himself that it really offended me.

The article is also making waves in the Phoenix Fire Department. Usually there's, I don't know, 100, and there was down to like three. This is Deputy Fire Chief Bob Kahn. When he arrives at work that morning, he takes a copy of the New Times from the newsstand right outside the fire station. I grabbed one, and I can remember going up to my office, and saying, you know, WTF, how do he do that? That guy talked to the press, and he thinks it's a joke. And there were families that were suffering. So as a firefighter, I wasn't happy about that.

When Lee Benson hears about the article, he has some choice words for the Phoenix New Times. I didn't think it was a serious news publication at all. He also doesn't buy what the arsonist is saying about the wider CSP group. There's no way it can be true. And I think the biggest thing for me, you can't have four people and keep something this big, quiet in Phoenix with all these eyeballs and ears on it. There's no way.

Somebody's playing with the media. Over at the task force headquarters, Lieutenant Rob Handy and his team have their hands on the article too. They knew the story was coming, but it's even worse than they thought. Somebody brought in some copies, and we were all reading it in the station. When you see that headline, what's your gut reaction? Oh, it was anger. Anger at James Hibbard, anger at the New Times.

They're celebrating and sensationalizing a criminal. It was total frustration. Even the unflappable FBI case lead Terry Kearns is unhappy. Had he reached out to us, we could have maybe surveilled and, you know, seen who it was or followed and got a tip on who it was. And he chose not to do that. Now that he's reading the actual article, Rob and his team are more angry than ever

that James and his editors didn't work with them to catch CSP as soon as they received that first letter. We really thought at the time the more this continued, somebody was going to get hurt and possibly killed. We giddy wants a story, but doesn't he want to stop these arsons from occurring? And people were bad.

I think there was just a bit of a sense around the newsroom that we had landed. a big one. We had caught the big fish, and now people were coming for us. James is confident that he wrote the article as responsibly as he could. He verified everything he could verify. He provided context, and he informed his readers that this guy might be an unreliable narrator. So we couldn't be accused of holding anything back. There'd be nothing for cops to come

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James is sitting in the office of the New Times attorney. Three cops from the task force are there to speak with him. I think that the tone was friendly. This is Sergeant Trent Crump. He's been on the investigation with Lieutenant Robb since the beginning. And he's one of the officers interviewing James. As far as I remember, the meeting was very cordial. Not how James remembers it.

three hard-boiled Phoenix PD detectives just staring at you. I got the vibe that they all thought I was a piece of shit. They start with the basics. Clarifying the beats of the story is told by the arsonist to James in the Park Bench interview. There's a lot of things we wanted to know. Lieutenant Rob Handy is there, too. When did he first contact you? On what phone number?

Have you had any prior contact with him? What did he tell you? Did you know anything about the fire the night before? Did you know what was going to happen? and all those things. I confirmed, yes, this was true, yes, that was true. He answers all of our questions. Then they started edging into details

that I hadn't thought about. And I started to get hesitant. I'm definitely feeling the pressure of the situation. James is trying to figure out where his journalistic line is, how much cooperation is too much. He's wrestling with what he owes to his source versus the cops versus the public. Keep in mind, this is his first job as a reporter.

Just trying to figure out in real time what questions they're asking are ones that I want to answer versus, you know, where do I say no, I'm not helping you anymore. Eventually, Robin Trent are satisfied that James isn't holding anything back, that he's given them all the information he has. I don't like the tactics of James Hibbard in this particular case, but I still believe that he was very fair. He answers all of our questions. I mean, he doesn't know the name of the person I think that James was as open as he was going to be without revealing a source. But there's one more thing they want James to do.

They really wanted me to set up another interview, or at least have another conversation with him on the phone, this time being on tape, to help them catch him. This puts James in a bad position. One of the first rules you learn as a journalist is that you don't give up a confidential source, to the authorities. And you certainly don't walk them

straight into a trap set up by police. If a journalist sells out a source and it gets out that they did that, then it would damage media operations everywhere by making it harder for reporters to get people to trust them. But when people's lives are at risk,

does that change the rules? We're like, well, you want to get people hurt? You're going to let somebody get hurt before we figure out who he is? James puts on his best poker face while he wrestles with this moral dilemma. What if he burns down to their house, and this time somebody gets hurt or killed? What if, like, an undercover cop sees him in the act and he shoots him to get away?

It's not lost on me that Rob is also feeling the weight of the world bearing down on him in this moment. He's only a few years older than James, and for him, the stakes are a lot bigger than getting a good scoop. Phoenix is counting on him to solve this case. But Rob has a huge joint task force in the weight of the FBI backing him up. James Hibbard is just a cub reporter, whose editor seems to have decided not to show up for this extremely important meeting with the cops. What about Lacey? How come he didn't show up to the meeting? All these questions you're asking about, why didn't your editors help you more in this? It's good questions. It's just ones I never really thought of until now.

And I'm like, yeah, well, why didn't they? Whatever the reason, James is on his own. The interview grinds on. Rob and Trent pressed James to cooperate. Inside, James is conflicted, but he keeps his mouth shut. That's when the detectives try a new approach. At the end of the interview, they said, there's a $76,000 reward, an anonymous reward,

for information leading to the arsonist capture. And they said, you can still be the journalist hero, while being an actual hero and help us catch him. Nobody needs to know that you helped us. Now, at the time, I was making 30K a year and had over 20K in student loan debt at 8% interest because that's what the 90s were like. The cops figure if they can't pressure him to cooperate,

maybe they can convince him with visions of hero status and a big payday. He can have his cake and eat it too. All he has to do is help. This was a massive amount of money they're offering. Next time, on The Arsonist Next Door, James has to make a choice and live with the consequences. Every morning I would wake up with a spit in my stomach. Thank God the guy went to the reporter.

He thought he was so smart that he could taunt law enforcement by manipulating the media. The bad guy made a mistake. Unlock all episodes of the Arsonist Next Door ad-free right now by suburb. subscribing to the binge podcast channel. Not only will you immediately unlock all episodes of this show, but you'll get binge access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts. All ad-free.

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The Arsonist Next Door is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and novel. This series was written and reported by me, Sam Anderson. It was produced and reported by Leona Hamid. Our assistant producer is Madeline Parr. Research by Zayana Yusuf. Additional production from Tom Wright and G. Stiles. Our editor is Dave Anderson. Additional story editing from Max O'Brien.

From novel, our executive producers are Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan. From Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. Sound design, mixing, and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson. Our original theme song was composed and performed by Nicholas Alexander. Production management from Cherie Houston, Joe Savage, Saratobin, and Charlotte Wolfe. Fact-checking by Danya Soleiman, story development by Nell Gray-Andrews. Novel's director of development is Selena Meta, and Willard Foxton is novel's creative director of development. Special thanks to Jen Feifield, Libby Goff, Bob Kahn, Zander Adams, Anthony Wallace, Steve Ackerman,

Carolyn Sher Levin, and the team at Reviewed and Cleared, Mario Cacchiatolo, Isaac Fisher, Kevin Lee Carras, Jess Swinburne, Sunny Marr, Carly Frankel, and the team at WME. Thank you.