Church fires started as joke

ATLANTA – The church fires that lighted up the night skies of rural Alabama and spread fear and anxiety along its remote back roads were set by three Birmingham, Ala., college students who started their spree as a joke, federal investigators said Wednesday.

The arrests of the men – the result of an extensive, multi-agency investigation – were a balm for some members of the nine burned churches.

But there also was bitterness and bewilderment as churchgoers learned of their alleged motives – and discovered that two of the suspects were students at Birmingham-Southern College. The private liberal arts school is associated with the United Methodist Church.

“I don’t see why they’d think that was such a joke,” said Bernice Brown, a member of the Morning Star Baptist Church near Boligee, Ala. “It wasn’t funny.”

All three suspects were in federal custody Wednesday. Two of them – Benjamin Nathan Moseley, 19, and Russell DeBusk Jr., 19 – are Birmingham-Southern students who have been suspended and banned from campus awaiting further action from authorities, school president David Pollick said.

Their alleged accomplice, Matthew Lee Cloyd, 20, is a former Birmingham-Southern student who transferred in the fall to the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Authorities said the men set fires that destroyed six churches and damaged three others last month. James Cavanaugh, a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said they initially appeared to be inspired by “an excitement, thrill motive.”

DeBusk and Moseley offered similar versions of the arson spree in interviews with authorities, according to an ATF affidavit filed in federal court.

On the night of Feb. 2, the trio allegedly set off into the woods of Bibb County, in central Alabama, in Cloyd’s Toyota 4Runner. They shot deer, and Moseley said they also set fire to two churches. When they saw fire trucks racing toward the scenes, Moseley said, they burned three more churches in acts he described as “spontaneous.”

Four days later, Moseley said, Cloyd joined him in another trip to a few western Alabama counties near the Mississippi state line. They burned four more churches there “to throw investigators off,” the affidavit states.

Cloyd also told an unnamed witness that one of the fires was set as “a joke and it got out of hand,” according to the document.