Arson

Firefighters took six minutes yesterday morning to douse this blaze in a vacant building on Stella Street near Germantown Avenue. No one was injured. Arson is suspected.

Arson is suspected in a minor fire at the Devereaux School's Berwyn campus on Jan. 25, Easttown police said. Police said a rolled-up blanket was ignited against a mattress in a girls' bathroom in the northeast corner of the gymnasium. The gymnasium previously had housed students who were displaced by a multi- alarm fire Jan. 10 that destroyed the second and third floors of a Devereaux dormitory on Waterloo Road in Devon. Leonard Green, the operations manager for the school, said that the fire damage Jan. 25 was minimal and that classes in the building resumed almost immediately after the fire had been extinguished.

A former Horsham volunteer firefighter, who admitted setting fires because he liked the camaraderie among the firefighters who battled them, has been sentenced to a 23 1/2-month-to-10-year term in Montgomery County Prison. Anthony M. McDonald, 24, who has been imprisoned since his arrest nearly a year ago, was sentenced last Thursday by Montgomery County Judge Albert Subers after pleading guilty to charges of arson, criminal mischief and causing or risking a catastrophe. Before his arrest, McDonald, formerly of the first block of Lower State Road, had won praise for his volunteer work.

Arson was the cause of a fatal hotel fire in Center City last month that killed one man and sent dozens fleeing for safety, the fire marshall's office ruled yesterday. Al Dreisbach, a middle-aged man from Millville, N.J., died in the four- alarm blaze at the Milner Hotel, on 10th Street between Chestnut and Sansom. Eleven people - nine of them firefighters - suffered minor injuries during the July 1 blaze. The ruling of arson makes Dreisbach's death a homicide, said Lt. Renald Pelszynski, a fire marshal.

An Oxford Circle man was charged yesterday with causing a $1 million carpet-store fire in December and will be charged in connection with two other fires - a minor blaze at a synagogue last summer and a major apartment-complex fire that routed 400 people, police said. Police said Anthony Yang, 20, of the 6000 block of Large Street, was charged with the two-alarm fire Dec. 26 at Spectrum Carpets, 6000 Castor Ave., which caused $1 million in damage to the store and its contents. During questioning after his arrest yesterday, police said, Yang allegedly admitted to setting two other fires in the area.

For the third time in six weeks, an arson fire broke out yesterday at Cookman United Methodist Church in North Philadelphia. There were no injuries and only minor damage. The fire at the predominantly African American church began in a plastic trash can at the bottom of the basement stairs. It was discovered shortly before 8 a.m. by a woman who smelled smoke when she opened the building to do some cleaning. The fire had been out for some time by then, investigators said. Damage was confined to the floor around the can and to the ceiling, which was darkened by smoke.

Arson is suspected in an early-morning blaze that ripped through a block of rowhouses yesterday in Camden, leaving seven families homeless, fire officials said. Camden County Fire Inspector Richard Johnson said the three-alarm fire appeared to have begun in an abandoned house about 5:45 a.m. and quickly spread to the other homes through a common attic. Nine two-story houses on Royden Street near 5th, seven of them occupied, were damaged, but no one was reported seriously injured, Johnson said.

A South Philadelphia man was arrested on arson and assault charges yesterday in connection with an early-morning house fire that injured four people, two critically. Investigators said the blaze started in the entryway of a two-story rowhouse on 26th Street near Ellsworth shortly before 3:30 a.m., and quickly spread to the first floor and part of the second floor. Firefighters found Marty Bell, 76, and Phillip Moore, 30, on the second floor of the house, investigators said.

Police say that arson caused a Saturday-night blaze that destroyed a business, and that they are looking for suspects who may have burglarized three buildings before setting the fire. Police Chief Robert H. Thompson said yesterday one or two suspects cut a six-foot barbed-wire fence to enter the complex at Calcon Hook and Hook Roads about 10 p.m. He said Power Motive Rebuilders, which occupied the building destroyed by the fire, was burglarized, along with Action Supply Co. and T&C Construction Co., which suffered minor fire damage.

Five Delaware volunteer firefighters and three of their friends were arrested Friday and charged with igniting or otherwise being involved in the setting of a dozen fires in the Newport area in the last five months, a state fire official said yesterday. Four adults, three of them firefighters for the Minquas Volunteer Fire Company in Newport, and four juveniles, two of them junior firefighters at the company, were arraigned Friday on charges that included conspiracy, arson, criminal solicitation and manufacturing incendiary devices, said state Deputy Fire Marshal Howard M. McMillan.

The fire that badly damaged a famous turn-of-the century mansion in Villanova has an undetermined cause, but there is no evidence to suggest it was "incendiary or suspicious in any way," according to the Radnor Township Fire Marshal. "The cause is undetermined at this time," Fire Marshall Don Wood said, reading from a written statement. "But an electrical failure in the area of origin could not be ruled out. " The April 4 blaze destroyed part of the 22-room mansion, which is known as Bloomfield and was built in 1885 but redesigned in the early 1920s by famed Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer in the style of a French chateau.

The 13 cottages dating to the 19th Century are rubble, as is the two-story chapel, and the cleanup finally has begun. Investigators now believe they have solved the mysteries of who started the fires in October and February at the historic Chester Heights Campmeeting, a religious retreat in Delaware County. But the organization's president, Pat Smith, said this morning that another mystery has her nonplussed: Why was the Campmeeting a target? "There is no vendetta against it," she said.

Evidence collected from two blazes about a mile apart in the Pinelands gives "clear indication" the fires were set, a state fire official said Sunday. The blazes in the Winslow Wildlife Management Area in Camden County, on the south side of the Atlantic City Expressway, scorched about 400 acres Friday. The fires were still smoldering Sunday but had been contained, authorities said. No specific cause of the fires had been determined, nor had any suspects been identified. The fires were set between Thursday evening and Friday morning, said Michael Drake, acting state fire warden for the state Forest Fire Service.

Camden County authorities say they have been notified that a man charged in the firebombing of a North Jersey synagogue possessed plans for a Berlin Township school. However, authorities were quick to say the man found the blueprints in a trash bin, and did not appear to have any plans to attack the school. The man, Aakash Dalal, 19, of New Brunswick, is charged with fellow defendant Anthony Graziano, in a Jan. 3 arson fire at Congregation K'Hal Adath Jeshurun in Paramus in which no one was injured.

In the 12 years he has been on Pennsylvania's death row, Daniel Dougherty has maintained that he did not set the fire that killed his two young sons in their Northeast Philadelphia home on Aug. 24, 1985. His fight to prove his innocence is now in a Common Pleas courtroom. His lawyers are trying to show that the lethal blaze was not arson but a tragic accident - and that Dougherty should be given a new trial. At a hearing Thursday, nationally known fire expert John J. Lentini disputed the conclusion of an assistant fire marshal who, in pivotal testimony at Dougherty's trial in 2000, said the fire had three points of origin, a classic indicator of arson: in the sofa, in a love seat, and beneath the dining-room table of the home on Carver Street.

Authorities have identified a 65-year-old elderly squatter killed Friday morning in a Camden arson fire. After battling a blaze that burned through a rowhouse on the 1200 block of Decatur Street, fire fighters found Paul Johnson on the second floor of the home around 4:15 a.m., police said. An autopsy ruled the man had died from smoke inhalation, and the Camden County Prosecutor's Office ruled the death a homicide. Johnson had prior addressed in Collingswood and Oaklyn, but police believe he had most recently been living in the abandoned home.

A Montgomery County man was found guilty of mail fraud and related charges Thursday for conspiring to burn down an auto-repair shop he owned in Philadelphia to collect the insurance money. Michael Giamo, 30, of Huntingdon Valley, was found guilty during a jury trial in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. Sentencing is set for June 20 before Judge Michael M. Baylson. Giamo is accused of arranging with an employee to burn down One Source Motors, Giamo's business at 14001 Bustleton Ave., using gasoline stored in cans there.

PHILADELPHIA 1 killed, 1 hurt in crash A head-on crash on a winding stretch of Lincoln Drive in Fairmount Park left one man dead and another hospitalized late Saturday night. Police said a 2002 Toyota Camry was traveling east on Lincoln Drive near Gypsy Lane through Fairmount Park when it crossed into oncoming traffic, striking a 2007 Honda Pilot SUV head-on. After the impact, the Camry burst into flames, killing the driver. Police said that man remained unidentified last night.

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that a man who contends that he was wrongfully convicted of setting a 1989 fire that killed his daughter may have a prominent fire expert examine any remaining physical evidence to determine whether the fire was accidental. The ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit came in the case of Han Tak Lee, 76, who is serving a life sentence. His lawyers argued that he was convicted by junk science and that research since his 1990 trial has debunked many of what were once considered ironclad indicators of arson.