Federal Agents Join Probe of Fullerton Church Arson Blaze

The investigation last week of the fire at St. Philip Benizi Catholic Church in Fullerton was different from many of the tens of thousands of arson cases that take place each year.

Federal agents were among those sifting through the debris.

“We have a carte blanche on church fires,” said Karl Anglin, an arson profiler and supervisory special agent for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ Los Angeles Arson Explosives Task Force. “Whatever resources we need to do a complete investigation, we get.”

Since a series of arson fires in 1996 began striking churches across the United States--particularly in the Southeast--such fires have become a federal priority. This aggressive approach has resulted in arrests being made at three times the rate of all other arson cases in Southern California, Anglin said. The national rate is just over double that of other arsons.

The positive results can be traced to the resources, manpower and far-ranging expertise that is brought to investigating the average church fire, said Glen Lucero, an arson investigator for the Los Angeles Fire Department and member of the city’s House of Worship Task Force.

In almost all arson fires, a so-called A-Unit of arson investigators soon arrives at the scene. They may be joined later by one or two more investigators. But in church fire investigations, that local A-Unit is quickly joined by about a dozen investigators from the ATF, FBI, district attorney’s office and the local police department who go door to door conducting interviews, Lucero said.

“It’s a shame you can’t work all fires like this,” Lucero said.

Up to two dozen investigators--mostly from the ATF--have been working on the Fullerton church fire, which started Aug. 17 and gutted the 42-year-old church, forcing parishioners to hold services in tents. So far, they have found no suspects and have no motives.

Lucero’s team in Los Angeles is almost always accompanied by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Criminal Conspiracy Section in the hunt for a cause and culprit in church fires. A Labrador retriever is trained to detect up to 17 types of accelerants from gasoline to turpentine to lighter fluid.

For many, a fire at a house of worship is considered a hate crime--a sweeping, sacrilegious act against a racial or religious group. This fear is grounded in American history, said David Meyer, associate professor of sociology at UC Irvine.

The civil rights movement helped reaffirm the role of churches as staging grounds in the great battles for equality, Meyer said.

This made them easy targets for arsonists. Church attacks, like the firebombing of a black church that killed four little girls in Birmingham, Ala., in 1964, give people ample “reason to think hate first,” Meyer said.

The fire that caused $1.3 million in damage to the sanctuary of St. Philip Benizi struck parishioners to the core.

“Churches are supposed to be safe,” Meyer said. “When a church is attacked, it comes across as a collective attack. People feel personally targeted.”

The stealth of the attacks only intensifies the feelings of vulnerability, Anglin said.

“Arsonists are cowards,” Anglin said. “They don’t have what it takes to face their problem.”

And yet, church fires--despite the fears they stoke in parishioners and national attention they get--are rarely declared hate crimes, federal and local arson investigators say.

Many church fires arise from the same malaise of human nature that spark other fires, officials say. Just as greed, revenge, profit and a twisted thirst for excitement motivate residential or commercial arsons, they also have spawned church fires. Often, they are set during a streak of fires set by an individual arsonist, Anglin said.

“In going through church arson fires, what we’ve found is that we’ve been arresting people who show the whole field of motivations for setting fires,” Anglin said.

Preachers and church elders, children and volunteer firefighters, homeless people and the mentally disturbed, thieves and drunks, pyromaniacs and racists: All have set places of worship ablaze, officials say.

Since May 1996, when the Los Angeles House of Worship Task Force was formed, it has launched 24 investigations into church and synagogue fires. None met the district attorney’s criteria for a hate-based crime, said Lucero, a Los Angeles Fire Department arson investigator for 22 years.

And with the exception of a 1995 arson at Dana Point’s South Shore American Baptist Church, no official arson-related hate crimes have been registered in Orange County in five years, said Mike Matassa, a supervising ATF agent.

Jay Scott Ballinger, 38, of Yorktown, Ind.--a man who called himself a missionary of Lucifer--pleaded guilty in federal court in Indianapolis earlier this month to setting the Dana Point and 25 other church fires across the nation during a five-year spree that ended last year.

Anglin said that about 10% of church fires prove to be hate crimes, but church leaders disagree.

Many insist that church fires tied to hate crimes make up a much higher percentage of house of worship arsons than federal investigators say. The recent rash of fires in South Carolina churches is a good example, said the Rev. Morris Stimage-Norwood, director of the National Coalition for Burned Churches, headquartered in Charleston.

“Eighty percent of the time a black church is burned, pastors are told it’s not racially motivated, and that most arsonists of black churches--who are mostly young whites--are just misguided young men,” Stimage-Norwood said. “Well, we got a lot of misguided young men.”

Under the coalition’s guidance, about 50 volunteers from Southern California recently traveled to Millen, Ga., to help rebuild the arson-razed Friendship Baptist Church.

The Rev. Yvonne Williams Boyd of the Altadena United Methodist Church says that almost all attacks against churches, synagogues or mosques are hate crimes.

“The person who sets a religious institution ablaze is working out of more than mischievous behavior; I don’t care what their pathology is,” she said.