Around 5:45am November 29th, one Parkside resident living on 47th Avenue and Rivera woke up to the smell of something burning.

“Somebody came to our house and pulled recycling out of our neighbor’s house,” she recalled to Hoodline. “They set it on fire right outside our garage…it burned for about eight minutes.”

The unidentified arsonist left the burning pile of cardboard leaning against the resident's stucco wall. The fire consumed the exterior wall, narrowly missing the garage door. 

“It didn’t burn my car or anything, but it was right by where our gas pipelines are,” said the resident, who preferred to remain anonymous. “It could have gotten to the gas lines and blown up the whole house.”

But it wasn't the only fire that night. 

“When the fire department showed up, they said it was their third call of the night,” the resident said.

According to one witness on NextDoor, one of those fires was set shortly before 3am in a shopping cart on the northwest corner of 46th and Wawona. The other burned inside in a garbage can on 47th and Taraval.

Residents in the area suspect that all three blazes may have been set by the same person. 

“It might have been someone walking down the street setting them off as he walked,” wrote one resident on NextDoor. 

Currently, one of these fires—the 47th and Rivera fire—is under investigation by the police, the SFPD confirmed. The resident has provided the police with security footage, which may reveal clues to the suspect.

“We saw the guy—the [camera] got just him leaving past my car—but couldn’t see his face,” she said. In the footage, the suspect was wearing a light-colored hood with a dark backpack, and could be seen walking away from her garage after the fire was lit.

The incident has left this Parkside resident shaken. In 10 years of living in the Outer Sunset, “nothing like this has ever happened to us before,” she said.