Several volunteer firefighters in Lincoln County committed arson by setting unoccupied buildings on fire, endangering the lives of fellow firefighters who responded to help fight the blazes, a grand jury charged yesterday.
The motive behind the blazes may have been that the firefighters were seeking a thrill, officials said.
"I think they were just some young boys with a lot of time on their hands and at some point wanted something to do," said Danny Glass, chief of the Lincoln County Fire Department, who helped investigate the firefighters under his command.
The Lincoln County department is a volunteer organization, so it was not a situation in which the men got paid to respond to fires.
Those indicted were firefighters Christopher Cross, Michael Griffin, Michael Bailey, Craig Gingraf, Linden Pullum and Kyle Cupp. The seventh man indicted, Aaron Denny, is not a firefighter, Glass said.
All are in their late teens or early 20s, said Commonwealth's Attorney Eddy Montgomery.
The indictment charges the men variously with either second-degree arson or complicity to commit arson. Several were also charged with wanton endangerment or complicity to commit wanton endangerment.
The arson charges carry a sentence of 10 to 20 years for a conviction; the penalty range on the endangerment charges is one to five years, Montgomery said.
The charges are that the firefighters took part in deliberately setting fire to an old school and two houses in May and June. The school was the one-room Hubble schoolhouse, an 1800s structure that the Lincoln County school district had been interested in acquiring.
The school and one house were abandoned, and all three were unoccupied, Glass said.
The young firefighters might have thought they weren't hurting anything by setting fire to older, unoccupied structures, he said.
Glass said he and state police began looking into the fires because of suspicious circumstances. None of the buildings had electricity on, ruling out a possible accidental ignition source.
The actions of some of the firefighters who have now been accused also caused suspicion. In two cases, the same firefighter reported the blaze and was among the first to reach the fires, Montgomery said.
In one case, a firefighter allegedly set a blaze and waited for someone else to report it, but when no one did, he called it in himself, Montgomery said.
Glass said he began suspending the firefighters in late June as information developed in the case.
"We don't condone what happened by any means," Glass said.
Glass said six of the seven men had turned themselves in by early evening yesterday. A judge had set bond for the men at $100,000 full cash or $200,000 in property, Montgomery said.
Distributed by the Associated Press
