BUM BURNS CHURCH, COPS

When fire gutted Oak Lawn’s historic Trinity Church last November 29, the community and the press cried “arson.”

It was a reasonable supposition. Oak Lawn has been one of the city’s five most popular areas for fire-setters, and the Trinity blaze was Oak Lawn’s second suspicious five-alarm fire in three days.

The church was valued at $750,000 and was listed on the National Register of Historical Places; but the McKinney Avenue land on which the church sat would be worth about $1.2 million, scraped bare. And the historical designation simply made it more difficult to get a demolition permit.

The church had been boarded up the previous August, after someone lighted a small fire in its basement using gasoline. Dallas arson investigators wondered whether November’s performance might be an encore, considering how rapidly the fire spread.

After more than six weeks of constant work, the investigators have virtually all the facts but very few answers. They know that the fire was started by a transient, but cannot say whether it was accidental or set deliberately, out of spite.

“We have had a person acknowledge that he set the fire,” city Fire Marshall Jerry Lambert confirmed. “But when you have a person say, ’I set it, but it was an accident,’ then you don’t have arson, you have trespass.”

The young man who claimed responsibility for the fire said it started because he was trying to melt down candle stubs to make new candles, but accidentally caught a room behind the church organ on fire.

Investigators cannot definitely refute his story, but they have their doubts. A female transient who was at the church on the night of the fire has told them that she thinks the young man set the fire deliberately. He had asked to have sexual relations with her, she said, and she had spurned him.

The fire was discovered and reported around 3 a.m. by Dallas police officers Joel Theis and Brian Harvey, who busted in the back door of the church in order to rescue the transients who they knew often slept in the abandoned building.

They found the woman and two men, dead asleep in a balcony room, Theis recalled, “not drunk and nowhere near the fire.” None of the three, he added, knew what was happening.

Indeed, all three came within precious few minutes of death. About five minutes after the police officers escorted the three out of the building, “the whole church was in flames,” Theis says.

The young man who said he started the fire accidentally was not in the church when Theis and Harvey searched it, and evidently had not turned in an alarm, either. His behavior leaves many questions about the blaze unanswered.

Why, for instance, did the fire-starter not extinguish the fire himself, in its early stages? Candle wax burns slowly, and not at all unless it is poured over or under some flammable material. If the fire was too big for the young man to put out by himself, he could have called on the other three transients for help, or warned them to get out of the building.

If the young man was notin the building when the firestarted, it’s only natural to,:wonder why anyone wouldleave a fire burning unattended in a building with beamsand walls as dry as tinder.And the rapid spread of thefire indicates that someone!may have tried to “accelerate”its burning with tinder or;flammable liquids -a sign ofarson.

Lambert says the young fire-starter “has disappeared.” With no permanent address or job, he may be! very difficult to find. But] then his absence may be a1 statement in itself.