Posted on 03/08/2006 11:03:17 AM PST by presidio9
Two college students arrested Wednesday in a string of nine rural Alabama church arsons told authorities that the first fires were set as “a joke” and later blazes were intended as a diversion, federal agents said.
A third college student was arrested later Wednesday in the serial arsons, according to WVTM-TV of Birmingham.
Benjamin Nathan Moseley and Russell Lee Debusk Jr., both students at Birmingham-Southern College, appeared in federal court Wednesday and were ordered held on church arson charges pending a hearing Friday.
Matthew Lee Cloyd, reportedly a student at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, was arrested midday, the WVTM reported.
An ATF affidavit said Moseley told agents on Wednesday that he, Cloyd and Debusk went to Bibb County in Cloyd’s Toyota sport utility vehicle on Feb. 2 and set fire to five churches. A witness quoted Cloyd as saying Moseley did it “as a joke and it got out of hand,” according to the affidavit.
Moseley also told agents the four church fires in west Alabama were set “as a diversion to throw investigators off,” an attempt that “obviously did not work,” the affidavit said.
Arson investigators scheduled an afternoon news conference at the Tuscaloosa airport to discuss the arrests.
The first two suspects were arrested Tuesday night, NBC’s Pete Williams reported.
WVTM-TV, citing the state fire marshal’s office, said the two are students at Birmingham Southern College and were arrested at a college dorm.
The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives made the Alabama church arson case a top priority as scores of agents joined state and local law officers in the probe.
Authorities analyzed tire tracks and traced the purchase of the tires to
-snip-
A federal source said the apparent motive was that the three students just liked to set and watch fires.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Well...you know the rest!
Two were attending a Methodist College. Sectarian violence?
Maybe the Feds could change the label to "humor crime"...
"Saint Peter, come on, it was just a joke."
"Ok, I'll let you in. Wait, just joking, down you go."
Funny joke....real funny. These boys are going to get to know the meaning of BOHICA after they're convicted, I'm betting. Now....that'll be funny as the dickens.
Not just moral idiots, but stupid too. Burn churches as a joke and then burn a few more to leave extra clues to help get you caught.
In my day, bad kids were smarter and morons didn't play with matches.
"I would say it was no accident that all those churches just happened to be Baptist."
Well, you'd actually have a hard time finding a rural church in Alabama that didn't have Baptist as part of its name. In town, you can find others, but if it's out in the country, it's almost certainly some form of Baptist church.
I think more will come out.
My guess is that as theater majors (gay) at a more liberal college, they went after the most anti-gay religion they could find (God Hates Fags are a splinter baptist group). They couldn't go after catholic churches, because of all the gay priests.
They don't want to be charged with a hate crime, so they said it was a joke.
See if I'm wrong.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
The youngest of them is 19. They aren't going to juvie. It's the big house for this terrible trio.
More to this story bump.
Only an idiot would think that way. Homosexuals, and the left in general, hate the the Catholic Church above all others.
The old joke is you can't swing a cat without hitting a Baptist church.
You might be right.
It's probably an unusually tire which narrows the suspects. The FBI probably figured out it was someone local to the initial fires and probably a teenager or young adult.
If they could tell from the tracks how old the tires were, they could probably narrow it down fairly quickly.
The truth is that there are just relatively few rural Catholic Churches in the Deep South.
"The old joke is you can't swing a cat without hitting a Baptist church."
I tried that once, in Mississippi, but the cat got loose and I had to have a lot of stitches in my arm. [grin]
If it had been mosques that were burned, it would had been deemed a terrorist act by the authorties.
Local news reports are blaming the Methodists.......gosh now I belong to the new ROP and I don't even have to put my butt in the air 5 times a day!
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