By MaryClaire Dale
Associated Press
COATESVILLE, Pa. — Agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are joining the investigation into a suspicious fire that tore through a block of row houses in this Philadelphia suburb.
The agency announced Monday that it will assist local investigators who have responded to at least 30 arsons since the beginning of 2008, about a half of them in the past three weeks. Saturday’s row house fire left several dozen people homeless.
Investigators have not yet labeled the latest fire an arson, but confirm that it fits the pattern of the previous ones, which typically started with items on front or back porches set ablaze. The fire appeared to have started on a rear porch in the middle of the block and spread across the rooftops, above the point where brick firewalls divide the homes.
Police Chief William Matthews has said the fires could be some form of gang initiation, although he offered no specifics. Police have interviewed several people about the unsolved fires, including the weekend blaze, but were not ready Monday to call any of them suspects, he said.
Chester County District Attorney Joseph Carroll, who is renovating a Coatesville row house he bought last year, notes that all of the fires have occurred within the city limits.
“Obviously, the person knows that police are paying extra attention, and yet they’re staying within the city limits. That tells me something,” he said. “Possibly it’s somebody who is angry at the city ... angry at the police chief or the fire chief.”
An overflow crowd packed a regularly scheduled City Council meeting Monday night, but people who wanted to testify were asked to wait until a town meeting on the subject Wednesday night.
Instead, members formalized the state of emergency called Sunday by the city manager, added $5,000 to a reward fund and authorized the purchase of 1,000 motion sensor lights for residents to buy at cost. Matthews asked for the authority to impose a citywide curfew as needed, and members said they would consider it but took no action.
Three suspects have been charged to date in three of the fires, including the early December blaze that killed an 83-year-old woman. That suspect told authorities that voices told him to burn the house down, Carroll said.
Despite the arrests, suspicious fires continue to strike this distressed steel town of about 11,000 people.
“I feel violated,” said an exhausted Arundell Johnson, 50, as friends helped him move appliances out of the blackened row home he shared until Sunday with his wife and two children.
Sid Shelton, a 53-year-old machinist returned Monday to find the roof of his home open to the sky. His daughter wants to leave town, but their finances probably won’t allow it, he said.
Like his neighbors, Shelton and his daughter are being put up at a nearby Holiday Inn for a few days. Like it or not, they’ll probably move in with some of his other children, who also live in Coatesville, he said.
“We’re all struggling,” Shelton said in his debris-strewn bedroom. “This is an entire city they’re terrorizing.”