Authorities Link Maryland Arsons to Racing Club

The alleged ringleader of a street racing club “wanted to do something big” and so plotted the arson spree that ravaged a southern Maryland subdivision this month, authorities said Thursday.

Patrick S. Walsh -- a 20-year-old amusement park worker who reportedly had experience with pyrotechnics -- “came up with the idea and began approaching others about setting these fires,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Donna Sanger said during a detention hearing. She said the goal was to make a name for Walsh’s “Unseen Cavaliers,” a group that collected and raced Chevrolet Cavaliers.

After searching Walsh’s residence Wednesday night, federal officials disclosed allegations that he had identified the club’s inner circle with the letter F -- for family -- in a digital directory on his cellphone.

Walsh and five other men have been charged with setting the Dec. 6 fires that destroyed 10 unoccupied houses and damaged 16 others in the Hunters Brooke subdivision near the town of Indian Head in rural Charles County. Investigators are seeking at least 10 others believed to have some knowledge of the case.

The only motive Sanger cited Thursday was Walsh’s alleged desire for notoriety. Since the fires that caused $10 million in damage, federal affidavits have suggested that two of the accused may have been spurred by revenge for personal setbacks; officials also have alluded to the possibility of racial animosity toward the subdivision’s high concentration of black customers. All of the accused are white.

But as the speculation that had surrounded the case gave way to more prosaic allegations, some of those with knowledge of the investigation questioned its high-profile handling and media coverage. “First we hear it’s ecoterrorists, then racists. Now we see a bunch of car fanatics,” said one lawyer involved in the proceedings. “Not exactly big-time stuff.”

The construction of Hunters Brooke on the edge of an ecologically sensitive area had sparked opposition; some longtime Charles County residents also reportedly were bothered that a number of African American families wanted to move in.

But most of the prospective homeowners had not yet completed purchase agreements when the houses were set ablaze using propane torches and flammable chemicals. Now the burned-out families face uncertainty until their houses are rebuilt -- a limbo that could last six months or more.

“We’re just going to have to sit tight for a lot longer than we expected,” said Yvonne Haley, who had hoped to move with her husband, George, a government contractor, into a Hunters Brooke house in late January. The house they chose, but had not yet bought, burned to the ground.

At one point during the series of hearings for Walsh and four others Thursday, Federal Magistrate Judge Charles B. Day noted that race was “a nonfactor here.” Moments earlier, Walsh’s lawyer had alluded to the possibility that a federal hate crime charge might boost his client’s potential jail time.

For the moment, Walsh and the others are facing only arson charges.

Day ordered that Walsh be held without bail at the Prince George’s County Detention Center; he released a second suspect, Roy McCann, to home imprisonment and electronic monitoring. Hearings for three others were delayed.

Complaining that Walsh had been kept in lockdown in his cell 23 hours a day, defense attorney William B. Purpura asked if his client also could be released on bond and kept in his parents’ home under electronic monitoring. Day refused, saying federal authorities had convinced him that Walsh was potentially dangerous to the community.

Walsh, a short, stocky man with a jutting black beard, said nothing before he was led back to a holding area by a U.S. marshal. Moments later outside the courtroom, Purpura said Walsh was not the leader of the Unseen Cavaliers or the prime force behind the southern Maryland fires.

“There’s no oath, nothing signed in blood,” the attorney said. “They race together; they eat at Wendy’s and Denny’s together; they get together and fix up their cars. They do anything a group of 20-year-olds would do.”

He scoffed at accounts of Walsh’s leadership role, saying: “This was just a family of friends.” Purpura added that Walsh had “absolutely no expertise in pyrotechnics,” noting that none were found during the search of his parents’ home, where he had been living in recent months.

Federal authorities did not detail the items they seized. But a police dog sensitive to chemical accelerants “keyed on” both of his Cavaliers, Sanger said. She said Walsh had been talking about the arson scheme since August, and at one point had “poured gasoline” with several others in a field in neighboring Prince Georges County, then set the expanse ablaze.

Walsh contacted several of the plotters on a computer chat room and conducted “conversations to make this happen,” Sanger said. The scheme, she said, was “designed to do as much damage as possible to the Hunters Brooke development.”