Investigators Tackle Church Blazes With Devotion

The investigation last week of the fire at St. Philip Benizi Catholic Church in Fullerton was a little out of the ordinary compared to the tens of thousands of arson cases that take place each year.

For one thing, there were the feds--from the FBI to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms--sifting through the debris. Sniffing for clues was Sully, a Labrador retriever. Investigators canvassed the neighborhood with questions.

For the federal government, probing a fire at a house of worship makes all the difference.

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

Ever 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.

In Southern California, this aggressive approach has resulted in arrests at three times the rate of those for other arson cases, Anglin said. The national arrest rate for church arson cases is more than double that for other arson cases.

In almost all arson fires, an “A Unit” of arson investigators soon arrives at the scene and may be joined later by one or two other investigators.

But in church-fire investigations, that local A Unit is quickly joined by about a dozen other investigators from the ATF, the FBI, prosecutors and the local police department, who go door to door conducting interviews, said Glen Lucero, an arson investigator for the Los Angeles Fire Department and member of the city’s House of Worship Task Force.

“It’s a shame you can’t work all fires like this,” said Lucero, who’s been a Los Angeles Fire Department arson investigator for 22 years.

As many as two dozen investigators--mostly from the ATF--have been working on the Fullerton church fire, which occurred Aug. 17 and gutted the 42-year-old church, forcing parishioners to hold services in tents.

So far, officials have found no suspects or motives for the fire.

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

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Many consider a fire at a church or other house of worship 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.

For example, during the Civil Rights movement, churches were etched into the American memory as staging grounds for the battle for equality, Meyer said, a stance that may have given people “reason to think hate first.”

A seminal event in the Civil Rights movement was the firebombing at a black church that killed four little girls in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963.

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

Just as greed, revenge, a desire for profit or a twisted thirst for excitement may motivate residential or commercial arsonists, these reasons also may spawn church fires. Often, an arsonist will set a church fire during a streak of other fires for which he’s responsible, 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 said.

Since May 1996, when the L.A. House of Worship Task Force was formed, it has investigated 24 fires at churches or synagogues. None met the district attorney’s criteria for a hate-based crime, Lucero said.

With the exception of a 1995 arson at Dana Point’s South Shore American Baptist Church, no official 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 fire and 25 church fires across the nation during a five-year spree ending last year.

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

Many insist 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.”

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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 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.