'Terror' Ends After 3 Arson Arrests
Three university students were arrested Wednesday in a string of nine rural Alabama church arsons last month that allegedly were set first as "a joke" and later as a diversion, federal agents said.
With the arrests, Alabama Attorney General Troy King says "a reign of terror" is coming to an end.
Benjamin Nathan Moseley and Russell Lee Debusk Jr., both 19-year-old students at Birmingham-Southern College, appeared in federal court Wednesday and were ordered held on church arson charges pending a hearing Friday.
Matthew Lee Cloyd, 20-year-old junior at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, was arrested later Wednesday, U.S. Representative Artur Davis said. Davis said he learned of Cloyd's arrest from the FBI. Calls to the FBI about Cloyd's arrest were not immediately returned. Cloyd previously attended Birmingham-Southern.
"While all three are entitled to have their day in court, we are very hopeful that this is the end to the fear that has been rampant in West Alabama," Davis said.
The fear began, court documents show, when the three men who all attended a church-affiliated school, were deer hunting last month, CBS News correspondent Jim Acosta reports. They then decided on an entirely new target. First came the arsons at five churches in central Alabama. Then, a few days later, four more on the Western edge of the state were torched.
The arrests came in a probe of arsons at five Baptist churches in Bibb County south of Birmingham on Feb. 3 and four Baptist churches in west Alabama on Feb. 7. The federal Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agency had made the arsons its top priority, with scores of federal agents joining state and local officers.
An ATF affidavit said Moseley told agents on Wednesday that he, Cloyd and Debusk went to Bibb County in Cloyd's Toyota sport utility vehicle on Feb. 2 and set fire to five churches. A witness quoted Cloyd as saying Moseley did it "as a joke and it got out of hand," according to the affidavit.
Read the criminal complaint (.pdf).
Police believe the men went on something of a joyride, driving around and setting the churches ablaze, CBS News' Mike Webber reports. Later, they might have set separate fires in the western part of the state just to lead the police astray.
Moseley told agents the four fires in west Alabama were set "as a diversion to throw investigators off," an attempt that "obviously did not work," the affidavit said.
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.
Alabama is breathing a sigh of relief after the arrests.
Governor Bob Riley says it's "a good day for Alabama." Riley says now his state and religious groups "can rest a little easier."
FBI Agent Carmen Adams says the three suspects face conspiracy and arson charges.
The day before the arrests, agents spoke with Cloyd's parents, Kimberly and Michael Cloyd. The father said his son admitted that "he knew who did it and he was there," according to the affidavit.
Arson investigators scheduled an afternoon news conference at the Tuscaloosa airport to discuss the arrests.
A 10th rural Baptist church fire, in Lamar County, has been ruled arson but is not believed to be connected to the others. It was discovered on Feb. 11.
Investigators had said earlier that they were looking for two men seen in a dark sport utility vehicle near a couple of the church fires.
Agents have said they did not know a motive, but there was no racial pattern. Five of the churches had white congregations and five black.
The three students arrested Wednesday are white and all either attend or previously were enrolled at Birmingham-Southern, a Methodist-affiliated liberal arts college.
Five of the churches were destroyed and four were damaged, including one in which congregants, alerted during the night that churches were afire, arrived just as the apparent arsonists were leaving. That fire, quickly put out, had been set in the sanctuary near the altar — a pattern in the other church arsons in Bibb County and west Alabama.
Jim Parker, pastor of Ashby Baptist Church at Brierfield, a Bibb County church destroyed in the Feb. 3 arson, said the congregation has been apprehensive about whether the arsonists had some "political or religious agenda."
"I want to find out the motivation of these young men. Young folks get some crazy ideas," he said.
He said he had spoken to federal agents and understood 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."