45 Years For Church Fire Suspects?
The three college students arrested Wednesday in a string of nine Alabama church fires say they set them initially as "a joke" and later as a diversion. But what started out as a prank will have an ending that's no laughing matter. If convicted, these young men face up to 45 years in prison, CBS News correspondent Jim Acosta reports.
The three were jailed on federal charges of conspiracy and setting fire to a single church — Ashby Baptist. If convicted, each count carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison. Additional charges are possible, authorities said.
CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen expects the men to receive serious sentences if they're ultimately convicted.
"I think prosecutors and the judge are going to see the case as a perfect vehicle to send a message that this sort of conduct, whatever the motives, just won't be tolerated," says Cohen. "And I think that push is going to be more powerful than any argument that they get a lot of leniency because of their age or anything else."
Cohen says the only way the suspects get a break is if they plead guilty, "and even then I'm not sure that prosecutors will be eager to accept anything less than some prison time as a sentence."
Read the criminal complaint (.pdf).
Two of the suspects were identified as Benjamin Nathan Moseley and Russell Lee DeBusk Jr., both 19-year-old students at Birmingham-Southern College. Matthew Lee Cloyd, a 20-year-old junior at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, also was arrested.
Acquaintances said DeBusk and Moseley were both amateur actors who were known as pranksters and dreamed of becoming stars. They performed in campus plays and appeared in a documentary film.
The arson attacks apparently began when the three got into Cloyd's sport utility vehicle for a night of deer shooting in Bibb County on Feb. 2, according to Walker Johnson, a federal agent who investigated the fires.
Moseley told agents that the three set fire to five Baptist churches in the early morning hours of Feb. 3. A witness quoted Cloyd as saying Moseley did it "as a joke and it got out of hand."
Moseley also told agents the four fires in west Alabama were set four days later "as a diversion to throw investigators off," an attempt that "obviously did not work," the court papers said.
A judge ordered the three held until a hearing Friday.
The break in the investigation into the fires came when one suspect — Cloyd — confided to someone "that he had done something stupid," that he had "set a church on fire," Acosta reports.
Agents spoke with Cloyd's parents, Kimberly and Michael Cloyd. The father, a physician, said his son admitted that "he knew who did it and he was there," according to an affidavit. Then after the arrests, Moseley described how the church arsons unfolded, the affidavit said.
"We pushed and pushed and pushed until we could make the break," said Jim Cavanaugh, regional head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "This is a very difficult case."
DeBusk and Moseley were arrested on the same day they were featured in the campus newspaper. The article discussed their performances in campus plays, a documentary and their work in the film they had hopes of screening this fall.
Moseley wanted to head for Los Angeles after graduation, and DeBusk might have accompanied him.
"This is our crawling before we can walk," Moseley told The Hilltop News.
"You're crawlin', I'm walking," said DeBusk. "I crawled in high school."
Cloyd, who previously attended Birmingham-Southern, transferred last fall to UAB but was not believed to be involved in acting or film making with DeBusk and Moseley.
An attorney for Cloyd, Tommy Spina, declined comment on the charges, but added: "This is not a hate crime. This is not a religious crime."
Jim Parker, pastor of Ashby Baptist Church, one of the churches burned, said he heard that the suspects were promising students from good families.
"We really are concerned about them as people," he said. "I would just like to know what they were thinking."