Former LaFayette utility worker and firefighter Marvin Chase, who was arrested in December ’10 and accused of lighting thirty arson fires, pled guilty this week to setting only eight and gets 18 months in jail plus 20 years probation. That’s 2.25 months for every house. Obviously they had a really STRONG case against him to accept this kind of a deal.
LaFayette has had a fire problem forever, but in the last ten years fires have gotten a lot worse. As long as the fires stayed “over there” nobody cared, but once arsons moved to the “good side of town” it became a concern.
In May 2010 an arson fire was set on First Street near a councilman’s home, and another was set on Indiana Street within smell of North Main. At that point LPD declared an “epidemic” and offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arsonist’s arrest.
We did about half an hour of investigation and found a whole bunch of people who all named the same suspect, a teen crackhead who lived in Linwood and had been bragging about setting the fires. We didn’t name him in the article but hinted to his name and linked to something else naming him.
During the summer of ’10 LPD started actually investigating the arsons, but Chief Freeman refused to support the officers involved. P.D. Vaughn was head of the case and he resigned in disgust because of getting no support.. Along the way Robbie Tate also had some responsibility for the investigation and he requested a transfer to road patrol because of how Freeman was treating him and the case.
In December 2010 LPD picked up the same kid we named as a suspect for stealing metal to fuel his drug habit. He pointed fingers to Marvin Chase, who was a firefighter for the city and had worked for the gas department until recently. The juvenile rolled on Chase to help get himself out of trouble, and they had to call officer Vaughn to ask him where the case file was since nobody had looked at it in months. Stacey Meeks, who inherited the case, then took credit for tracking down the arsonist and solving the case. Said Marvin confessed to twenty and was responsible for thirty.
The LU called Meeks out for his minor role in the case, and named the juvenile suspect again because we were told by members of his own family he had rolled on Chase to get out of his own role in the fires.
Meeks wrote a chapter-length response on our blog post chewing us out and denying everything we said, dared us on Facebook to call him on the phone… It’s all still there, phone number and all, mixed with about sixty comments on that article.
Fast forward to this week..
The fires they nailed him for don’t all fit the pattern. The one that had an eyewitness was set in the day off Rhyne Rd. One was on West Main.. Two were set at the same time on opposite sides of town. There are way more fires unsolved than solved, and one has been set since his arrest that they say is a “domestic issue” for some reason.
The end results of this are very unsatisfying. Justice done very lightly, and only for a portion of the crimes. Others who were involved, or who set other fires, face no punishment.
Did Marvin Chase set fires? Yes. Did he set them alone? No. Did anyone else set them on their own? Yes. Will anything else ever come from this? Absolutely not.
Someone vandalized the Bebe! billboard south of town on 27 heading to Trion. Please note that we don’t condone vandalism, violence, or other law-breaking even in protest.
Someone climbed up there, blacked her teeth, and wrote a profanity on the jacket. The billboard company or someone from her campaign, maybe, cut the damaged sections out of the board before we got our photo.
This is a crime, and dangerous.. Will cost a lot of money to fix. We understand frustration, but don’t resort to this.
The vandalism may not be related to politics, it could just be random.. We DO have wild herds of youth who wander the county with nothing to do except break things. Even if it’s done out of frustration with Heiskell, there’s no connection to the Shaw campaign. But it’s probably just a matter of time before someone tries to blame it on Shaw or the LU.
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