Set Church Fire for Insurance, Pastor Reportedly Admits

A Burlingame pastor has confessed to setting a fire that destroyed his church in order to collect insurance money to renovate the 55-year-old building, police said Thursday.

Paul Bray Jr., 32, is scheduled to be arraigned today on charges that he started the Sunday blaze, which caused an estimated $1 million in damage to the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Burlingame.

Bray admitted that he doused parts of the church with gasoline and then torched it, but said he did not mean to burn the entire building, according to investigators. Colleagues in the church said they were shocked to hear reports that the pastor was connected with the fire.

“He was a very dedicated man, I thought. I still think he is,” said Darrell Leamon, pastor of the Central Seventh-day Adventist Church in San Francisco. “He’s a real man of God, with a genuine concern.”

After hearing about the fire, Leamon had drafted a letter offering Bray and his 200-member congregation the use of a church building in Redwood City.

“He was under a lot of pressure. He was remodeling the church,” Leamon said. “When a person is pushed they can do some bizarre things.”

Bray, who was being held on $10,000 bail in the San Mateo County Jail in Redwood City, would not comment on Sunday’s fire.

His alleged confession did not come as a complete surprise to investigators, said Gary Missel, head of the Burlingame Police Department’s investigation unit.

“When we tried to contact him early that morning, he wasn’t there. When we found him later he said he was out for a walk,” Missel said. “There’s an old police adage: You don’t believe in coincidence.”

Meanwhile, church officials will not know until at least next week whether they will be able to collect insurance money to build a new church for the Burlingame congregation, said Herb Broeckel, president of the Central California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. Broeckel would not say how much insurance the building had.