More than two years before December’s Ghost Ship fire claimed 36 lives, the building’s owners knew of dangerous electrical problems there — including a transformer fire in an adjacent space never reported to authorities — and learned that tenants had installed power upgrades without city permits, according to emails obtained by this news organization. But they resisted efforts to fix the problems.

“The lack of electrical infrastructure was made very clear before your lease began,” Kai Ng, the son of building owner Chor Ng, wrote in a Feb. 15, 2015, email to Derick Almena, who ran the artists’ cooperative in the illegally converted Ghost Ship warehouse, subletting space to artists who lived there.

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The revelations about what the Ngs knew “clearly strengthens an involuntary manslaughter charge and also makes second-degree murder (charges) more plausible,” said Stanford Law School professor Robert Weisberg.