CRIME BEAT by Paul Davis

Copyright © 2002 Paul Davis. All rights reserved.

    I was waving the hose in short left to right movements and allowed the fire to slip past me on my right. The flicker of flame seemed almost human – perhaps even supernaturally evil – as it lashed out like a whip and struck my right arm.

    The pain and the shock of getting burned caused me to drop the hose’s nozzle and jump back. Fortunately, the instructor quickly grabbed the discarded nozzle and ordered me out of the burning structure. To my further embarrassment, the heavy smoke and the hood of my poncho impaired my vision and I hit my head on the hatchway as I was exiting. The other instructors thought I was injured far more seriously than I truly was.

    My burns were superficial and the head injury was only a bump, but my pride received some serious blows that day. I returned to the fire a while later and completed the course without further incidents.

    I thought of my Navy fire fighting experiences as I closely followed the fire stories in the news. The wildfires in Oregon, Colorado and the other western states have been big news. The draught brought on some fires, people set some and even wildlife got into the act.

    In a twist on the Goldilocks story, a mother bear and her cub broke into a home in California looking for something to eat. No one was home when the 300-pound black bear crawled through an open window. Evidence suggests that the bears knocked over a lamp and that sparked a fire, trapping the bears in the kitchen where they were found dead.

    Also featured in the news was the marking of the 35^th anniversary of the explosion and subsequent fire that killed 134 sailors on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal on July 29, 1967. After the fire, all carrier sailors were sent to fire fighter school and as part of the training, viewed the carnage filmed from the camera placed on the carrier’s superstructure.

    The USS Forrestal was on "Yankee Station," off the coast of Vietnam, launching air strikes against enemy targets when one of the carrier’s parked F-4 Phantom jet fighters accidentally fired a Zuni rocket across the flight deck. The rocket struck Lt. John McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk and the future POW, Senator and presidential candidate got out of his plane just before a 1,000 pound bomb fell from the Skyhawk. The dropped bomb caused the plane’s tank to spill JP5 jet fuel onto the deck and the resulting fire caused the bomb to "cook off." The blast instantly killed many of the plane’s crew. The explosion set off a chain reaction of explosions from the fuel and bombs from other aircraft on the flight deck.

    The heroic sailors who fought the inferno saved the ship and prevented what could have been a much greater loss of life. Lt. McCain’s squadron was out of commission, so he volunteered to join another combat squadron off the USS Oriskany. On October 26^th, 1967, McCain flew off the Oriskany and was shot down over North Vietnam. He was a prisoner of war for five and a half years.

    After graduating from fire fighting school, I went on to fight some real fires during my Navy days, but thankfully nothing along the lines of the Forrestal fire. After the Navy, I covered residential and industrial fires as a reporter. Most were accidental, but some were deliberately set.

    Arson is defined in Jay Robert Nash’s "Dictionary of Crime," as the unlawful and malicious destruction of property by fire or explosion. The felony is generally categorized by degree; first degree being the burning of a residence; second degree being the burning of any building near residential property; third degree being the burning of any property with intent to recover insurance; and fourth degree being an attempt to burn property.

    The biggest arson case I covered was in 1994 when three teenagers, hired by local drug dealers, torched a vacant plant. The Quaker Lace factory arson case was the largest narcotics-related arson in the United States at the time. The five story, block long building was burned because the drug dealers objected to the police using part of the building as a surveillance point. Fortunately no cops were there at the time of the fire.

    "City and federal investigators worked day and night, "beating the bushes," going back two, three times to talk to possible witnesses," I recall an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) special agent who worked the case with Philadelphia detectives and fire marshals, telling me.

    "We caught a couple of breaks and developed some sources. We came up with both the people who set the fire and the people who hired them," he added.

    The fire destroyed the factory and spread to the residential neighborhood. The lives of 47 families were affected, as the fire destroyed their homes, cars and possessions.

    I also spoke to a Philadelphia Detective Sgt from the Eastern Police Division and he said the arsons committed in his division were mostly a tool used against other dealers and to intimate witnesses. The detective also worked arson fires set as a result of insurance fraud and boyfriend/girlfriend or /husband/wife disputes.

    The arsonist, investigators say, can be a pyromaniac, a fire setter who gets a sexual charge, a drug dealer seeking revenge, or juveniles who get a thrill out of setting fires. And there are "torches," the name given to professional criminals that set fires for profit.

    Arson is often used to cover up a homicide or a burglary. The hope is to destroy evidence, but law enforcement technology is so advanced that the investigators are often able to uncover the evidence in spite of the fire.

    The most common arson tools are the Molotov Cocktail, (gasoline in a bottle with a wick) and the "gasoline pour," where an arsonist spreads the gasoline around a site and ignites it with a match. More sophisticated methods are sometimes employed as well.

    I recall a story told me to me by a cop who was tracking an arson ring that was burning down bars and warehouses for profit. One of the arsonists burned himself in the process of torching the building, and he stepped right out of his sneakers, which had melted to the sidewalk in front to the building. When the cops tracked him down, the burns on his legs were in plain view. He told the cops it was a serious case of sunburn.

    Another investigator told me of an arson case which resulted in the deaths of five children.

    "It was a senseless crime that occurred right before Christmas," he said sadly. "And I can’t explain to you how bad it was, walking through a burned–out house and seeing a family that has lost everything."

    Since my Navy days, I’ve respected firefighters. That respect and admiration was enhanced 10 fold by the firefighters’ heroic response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I also gained a good deal of respect for the arson investigators who track down and put the arsonists in prison.

The Fire Next Time

    In my next column, I’ll cover the firefighters who also start fires. I’ll write about Joseph Wambaugh’s "Fire Lover: A True Story." The true crime book, authored by the former LAPD Detective Sgt. and novelist, chronicles John Orr, the California fire investigator turned arsonist.