Neighbors Are at a Loss Over Students’ Arson Arrest

“BSC theater students Russ DeBusk and Ben Moseley are on the road to stardom,” said the story in the campus newspaper at Birmingham-Southern College.

A few days ago, many students here would have said that was a fair prediction. The two sophomores were creative, popular products of Birmingham’s comfortable suburbs. Benjamin Nathan Moseley, the son of a Jefferson County constable, sang baritone in the college choir. Russell DeBusk Jr. had been chosen to star in a local director’s feature film, with Moseley playing his comic foil.

They were being molded by one of Alabama’s most prestigious private schools -- a Methodist-affiliated college where 70% of students take part in organized volunteer work.

Yet when the biweekly paper hit the racks this week, DeBusk and Moseley -- both 19 -- were in federal custody, charged in a string of church fires in poorer, rural communities to the south and west of here.

A third man, Matthew Lee Cloyd, 20, also was arrested and charged in connection with the fires. Cloyd, a student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is the son of a doctor and was an honor student in high school.

In the suburbs of Birmingham this week, people were perplexed. “They were smart kids, middle class,” said Lane Graham, 57, a resident of DeBusk’s hometown, Hoover. “You don’t know if it’s stuff they read, stuff they learned in school or what.”

“These kids were not some huckleberries from the South,” said Renee Sakaguchi, a parent in Indian Springs Village, a tony suburb of rolling hills and horse farms where Cloyd grew up. “I’m going to have my sons read the [newspaper] articles and say: ‘Look at what these boys had in front of them -- and now look at what they have to look forward to.’ ”

Birmingham is a city with pockets of wealth nourished by the old steel and iron industries and, more recently, healthcare and banking.

All three suspects in the church fires grew up in neighborhoods with median household incomes of more than $50,000. In Sumter County, where the students allegedly burned Galilee Baptist Church, the median household income is $18,911. Nearly 40% of Sumter County residents live below the poverty line.

The charges seemed particularly difficult to swallow at Birmingham-Southern. The small campus attracts the children of Alabama’s elite. Its students are proud of their commitment to public service. They tutor in inner-city Birmingham, work in San Francisco homeless shelters and volunteer in Mozambique.

Some on campus sought Thursday to distance themselves from the arrests. A few dozen students had signed a resolution posted in the cafeteria and passed by the student government the night before. It stated that the crimes did not represent the school’s principles of “positive community and civic engagement, honorable morals and global human dignity.”

Others looked for words to describe their feelings about the suspects, young men they knew as friends or valued students and could still speak of warmly.

“I am overwhelmed by the immense immaturity of it,” said Lester Seigel, the choir director and chairman of Birmingham-Southern’s fine arts department. “There is a moral disconnect -- this is so out of the bounds of what we deal with here.”

Federal authorities allege that Moseley, DeBusk and Cloyd burned five churches in central Alabama during a night of hunting that started Feb. 2.

Moseley and Cloyd burned four more churches a few days later to throw investigators off their trail, according to an affidavit filed by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The document quotes Cloyd as telling a witness that the fires started as “a joke and it got out of hand.”

DeBusk and Moseley were campus clowns, to some extent, but entertaining was something they took seriously. According to the student paper, they were thinking about moving to Los Angeles together to pursue careers in film. They spent much of 2005 honing their dramatic skills in campus plays, eventually attracting the attention of Brian Wilson, 25, an aspiring director who cast them in his movie “Work,” a romantic comedy.

He said DeBusk and Moseley showed up in the audition in matching baseball shirts and pitched themselves as a team. He liked their rapport and their timing. He also liked their professionalism: The next day they showed up at his house in suits, with head shots and resumes in hand.

The small crew shot many of their scenes while the newspapers were full of stories about the church fires. Wilson said his director of photography brought the issue up one day but DeBusk and Moseley seemed uninterested.

“They were just like, ‘Oh, that’s crazy, whatever,’ ” he said.

Birmingham-Southern students recalled Thursday how Cloyd came around from time to time to hang out. He was a former Birmingham-Southern student and member of the Sigma Chi fraternity who had met DeBusk and Moseley in the dorms, students said. But he had transferred to the University of Alabama at the start of the current school year, where he was in the pre-med program.

Ian Cunningham, DeBusk’s suitemate, said Cloyd could be bothersome. “He mocked everybody; he had no tact. It seemed like he didn’t have a lot of selfesteem.”

Something else disturbed Cunningham: DeBusk had come back from summer break talking about Satanism, and he had gotten Moseley interested as well. To DeBusk, Satanism was not a violent religion, but a peaceful means of self-actualization, Cunningham said. DeBusk had always kidded his churchgoing friends about their faith in Christianity, but Cunningham said it was a gentle sarcasm, not a bitter one.

He recalled DeBusk and Moseley having some strange weekends. “They’d show up at 7 in the morning covered in pine needles,” he recalls. “They’d just have strange little hippie rituals in the woods.”

The infatuation with the occult seemed to last about a month, Cunningham said. After September, he didn’t hear either of them speak about it.

Wilson said he hadn’t finished shooting his movie when his stars were arrested. On Thursday, he was trying to figure out what to do next -- maybe recast and re-shoot, maybe sell some of the footage of the suspects to TV news stations.

On the Birmingham-Southern campus, students were still carrying around the campus paper with the story about DeBusk and Moseley. The last paragraphs discuss DeBusk’s plan to one day write, direct and star in his own film.

Moseley said his friend “has the potential to do everything he wants to do.”

Times researcher Jenny Jarvie in Atlanta contributed to this report.