Burn,Baby,Burn

For 20 years Jerry Lambert worried about kids who set fires. He saw houses consumed by the flames from a toddler’s matchstick, and the charred remnants of parents and children caught by smoke or flame. But the problem seemed as elusive as ball lightning until one skillet-hot afternoon last August, when Lambert watched a 6-year-old firebug coldly confess to attempted murder. Lambert, who is Dallas’ fire marshal, sat in the institutional-beige office of a local child psychiatrist, along with half a dozen of his newly anointed commandos in the war on arson. There, they watched the videotaped images of a cherubic brown-haired boy and his balding counselor.

On the day of the fire, the psychiatrist asked, what did you do after you woke up?

/ got my truck out, said the boy, as tonelessly as a cop testifying at a petty-theft trial. I played a little. I wanted to play with my mom.

Would she play with you?

No.

Where was your mom?

Asleep.

Did that bother you?

I don’t remember.

Were you sad or happy?

Sad. She never plays with me.

Did you stay sad?

I got mad.

What happened then?

The boy’s shoulders began shaking, and sobs rattled over the television’s speaker. The psychiatrist sat patiently, impassively. The boy’s mother squirmed a bit, looking neither at the doctor nor at her son. The boy’s hand trembled toward his mother. She ignored it. The psychiatrist’s assistant handed the boy a Kleenex. His tears stopped and his face went blank as a refrigerator door.

Then what did you do?

Weil, I got a cigarette lighter.

Then what?

I struck it.

What did you do then?

I caught the bed on fire.

How?

I lit the bedspread.

Did you do that accidentally, or were you trying to light the bed on fire?

I was trying to light the bed.

Where was your mother?

In the bed.

Did you know she was in the bed?

Yes.

Did you know the bed could burn up?

Yes.

Did you realize you could hurt your mother?

Yes.

Did you realize your mother could die?

Yes.

Did you want your mother to die?

Yes.

Again and again they discussed the fire. Each time the boy reaffirmed his intention to cremate his mother where she lay: Either she would get up and play with him, or she would die.

The doctor asked him to remember how he felt when he started crying. Was that how he felt before he started the fire?

Yes. Sad and lonely.

Earlier, the psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Bumpass, had won the boy’s promise that he would try to stop setting fires, as he had done continuously for several months. What, he asked the boy, will you do next time you feel sad and lonely like that?

Watch TV or play with a friend.

The tape ended, and Dr. Bumpass told the firefighters that as far as he knew the boy had set no more fires.

Lambert, whose job it is to prevent fires in the city of Dallas, felt elated. He also felt worried. Where was he going to find the money for five psychologists to counsel all the kids who set fires?

“I can train your people to do this,” he heard Bumpass say. “You all can be as effective as I am.”

“You know those days when everything happens exactly right and you don’t know why?” Lambert asks, recalling the session several months later. “That was one of those days. If I’d have known how good it would be, I’d have gotten up earlier that morning.”

Juvenile arson may be one of the country’s best-kept secrets. About half of Dallas’ incendiary fires are set by children. In 1980, children were known to have set 405 serious fires in Dallas, causing $1.6 million in damage. The fire department classified 206 of those fires as deliberate and 199 as accidental. Later, Lambert figured that three-quarters of those “accidental” fires should have been classified as intentional. Nationally in 1980, nonacci-dental fires killed 770 people (not including firefighters) and caused $ 1.76 billion in damage. One out of every three persons arrested for arson was under 16; one out of six was younger than 12; 7 percent had not reached their 10th birthday. There is evidence that many adult arsonists began setting fires as children.

Young fire setters* have fascinated and baffled psychiatrists ever since Freud’s first slip. The master himself first suggested that fire setting was connected to ambition, homosexual rivalry and urethral eroticism. His followers built ever higher on that sandy foundation, proclaiming connections between fire setting and bed-wetting, “fixation of sexual development at the level of urethral-phallic impulses,” and “blocked sexual drive.” Textbooks written prior to World War II said that fire setting was most common among women, especially teen-age girls.

Not until 1939 was a well-researched paper on the topic presented to American psychiatrists. Its author, Helen Yarnell, diplomatically said that her findings were “somewhat at variance” with the existing literature.

Bed-wetting and sex – urethral-phallic, blocked and otherwise – apparently had very little to do with the bad habits of the 60 young firebugs she treated. And only two of those children were girls. She did, however, note several similarities among the youngest members of her study group. They set fires in and around their homes, and usually managed to extinguish the flames themselves. They fantasized about burning either a parent who withheld love from them or a sibling who had become too serious a rival for parental love. Their intelligence often was normal, but they tended to suffer from learning disabilities or physical handicaps that hindered their adjustment to school or society. And they had horrible nightmares, including attacks by ghosts or by the devil.

(The devil continues to haunt young firebugs. On January 26, one of Dallas’ fire department counselors talked to a 6-year-old boy who, angry that his sister had gone shopping with his mother and returned with a coloring book, burned down the family garage. “The devil made me do it,” the child said. “The devil wants me to burn up my whole family.”)

Yarnell’s findings remain a watershed in the study of young fire setters. She, more than anyone before her, tied their compulsion to their feelings about their schools and, more importantly, their families. But her research had little effect on fire departments around the country, which were in a unique position to benefit from it. One reason was her inability to prescribe a quick, certain remedy. Another was that many firefighters thought psychiatry was nonsense – that kids would be kids, playing with matches and sometimes, accidentally, catching things on fire.

Dallas tollowed that traditional path until last summer. For at least the 20 years Lambert was with the department, it had sent firemen around to educate children about the dangers of fire, but done little to treat problem children. An adult arsonist would be shown the inside of the city jail; a juvenile would be shown the inside of a fire truck, and offered a chance to join the department’s “Big Brother” program.

To some extent, the city’s hands were tied. Texas’ family code did not hold children under 10 responsible for their own acts. When Lambert became fire marshal four years ago, he asked the city attorney’s office what could be done about children who set fires. Legally speaking, he was told, nothing. So the education program continued, until Lambert noticed that it had less effect on the problem than did the phases of the moon. Around the time Lambert took office, a young boy burned himself and his grandmother alive in their inner-city apartment, despite lectures, threats and pleas from firemen following his previous pyrotechnics.

“Chief Lambert’s not a sit-on-his-hands kind of administrator,” says one admiring subordinate. “He’ll try something first, and then find out if it’s legal.” Last summer, Lambert did something legal. He appointed a committee. He put Chief Barney McKenzie, a slow-talking, grandfatherly veteran, in charge. He gave McKenzie five positions to fill and a fistful of literature on what other departments were doing, and said, “Your only job is to stop those kids from setting fires.”

That was the assignment McKenzie passed along to the young arson investigator he picked to run the show. Captain Doug Preston was a quiet man, given more to reading than to shooting the bull. He was so quiet and unassuming that his superiors were amazed to see him score well on the captain’s promotion test. “He surprised us all,” Lambert said. “His psychological assessment showed him to be very highly rated for skills and ability.”

If Lambert and McKenzie are the starters of the counseling program, there is no doubt that Preston is its engine. When the other counselors have a tough-guy first-grader who won’t ’fess up or deal with them seriously, they call on Preston to crack the case. Preston’s back straightens; his jaw tightens; his demeanor changes from military chaplain to prison warden. He doles out what is colloquially known as “The Hardass Treatment.”

“What’s your name, son?” It comes out as a snarl.

“Joe.”

“Joe,” Preston parrots, as if he had tasted something foul. “Last name?”

“Sit down, Joe!”

Then, to his colleague, “Leave me and Joe alone for awhile. Me and Joe’s gonna have a little talk.”

Behind closed doors, Preston opens his Venetian blinds and jerks a thumb toward the city jail, which is 25 feet from his office window. “See those windows with bars on them, Joe? That’s the city jail. That’s where they put people who commit crimes – like murder, robbery, arson, burglary.”

After one such session, a former tough kid told his “nice guy” counselor, “Next time you leave, I’m going with you. Don’t ever leave me alone with that guy again.” Preston’s colleagues found that hugely amusing, because he is a notorious soft-touch who does his best work when he is nice to the children. He bought a basketball for one boy and has given Bibles to others. For three weeks last fall he got up an hour early every morning to drive two boys with an apathetic, alcoholic mother to school.

Preston and McKenzie picked the other four counselors as if they needed pinch-hitters for the Mod Squad. They wanted parents, who presumably could best relate to children. And they wanted people who could relate to all kinds of children, so they selected two blacks and two whites, one of each sex.

Jane Lewis, 35, would be the sensitive one. A former English teacher and the mother of a 9-year-old girl, she refused to look at slides of burn victims that Preston had gathered with an eye toward scaring the tough kids straight. Naomi Reynolds, 31, would be the vivacious one. She has a blinding smile and a wind-chime laugh and worries about not spending enough time with her 11-year-old daughter. Alcy Jackson, 27, would be the intelligent ex-jock. Biceps, triceps and pectorals bulge against his blue uniform shirt, as befits a former Baylor football hero. Kevin Sipes, 25, would be the big brother figure. He has worked in many youth programs but is Daddy only to a pair of Labrador retrievers, Hunter and Hershey.

Before going into business lor them-selves, Preston and his subordinates studied counseling programs in other cities, with an eye toward stealing their best features. They also spoke with officials in Dallas-area mental health and juvenile justice services. Somewhere along the line Preston got the name of Dr. Eugene Bum-pass, an instructor at the University of Texas Health Science Center. Lambert recalled Preston’s subsequent report as one of the few times he could accuse the captain of looking obviously overjoyed.

Bumpass offered something no other city had discovered: a reliable, relatively simple solution. For the past eight years he and Royanna J. Brix, a psychiatric social worker, had treated compulsive fire setters along with other problem children. They had treated 30 firebugs, including a 6-year-old boy who set his baby brother’s playpen afire while the toddler was napping in it. One-third of Bumpass’ patients had seen other counselors without success. After Bumpass’ treatment, only two children set other fires.

Bumpass had adapted a therapy technique called “graphing” to break the children of fire setting. He would draw a horizontal line across a piece of paper and ask his patient to think of the line as time on the day of the fire. Together, they would mark down all the important events and feelings affecting the patient before and after the fire. Indeed, the questions were so detailed that the child usually relived the event, crying as he felt the pain or rage that led him to light the fire. When they were finished, in an hour or so, the graph depicted the relationship between the child’s feelings and his actions.

Many children play with matches because they are curious about fire; a school fire-safety program might be enough to keep them out of trouble. But Bumpass’ patients – and nobody knows how many other children like them – were different. With them, it was a compulsion, a reflexive response to some internal itch. They burned to relieve stress or to make a point. The 6-year-old who lit his baby brother’s playpen on fire had two working parents and frequently was left alone with the toddler and his grandmother. He set the fire while she and the baby were asleep, and told Bumpass that he was lonely and got a feeling of “wanting to hurt” before he thought of starting a fire.

Bumpass’ patients light fires because they have difficulty dealing with their feelings. “The feelings that we see trigger the fires are sad and lonely feelings,” he says. The cause of that sadness can be as crushing as abandonment by Father or as petty as a harsh word from Mother – just another straw added, perhaps, to years of neglect or abuse. The triggering events may be significant only to the child; may be a part of everyday life. “It generally happens when they have lost some attention from the parent, Bumpass says.

That feeling of sadness or loneliness is fleeting. “It’s not macho to feel sad or lonely in our society,” Ms. Brix says. So the child gets angry and wants to do something to relieve his rage. Fire, which is both a magical, enchanting playmate and the deadliest weapon available to a youngster, is one form of relief.

Some fire setters come from loving families. Other children endure horrible lives without burning anything. Fire setting is the result of a complex interaction between child and family, and Bumpass has found that his patients can be wealthy or poor, with intelligence quotients ranging from high to well below average.

But he and Ms. Brix say that several things set firebugs apart from other children. The fire setters tend to have learning disabilities. They often have a poor sense of time. They seem less able to vent their anger or frustration through their fantasy lives. It is not enough, in other words, for them to merely imagine a fire that burns up their troublesome younger brother. And, more importantly for Bumpass’ therapy technique, they seem unable to mentally connect their actions with their emotions. Graphing bridges that gap for them.

Building that bridge allows children to know when an “urge to burn” is imminent, and to brace for it. “It gives them an option to substitute another behavior for the one they are having trouble with,” Bum-pass says. “Visiting a friend, riding a bike, watching television, playing with a dog. They need to learn to deal with their loneliness in another way.”

To convince children of that need, Bumpass talks rationally about fire and the trouble it can get them into. They virtually always promise they’ll try to stop. When they think about it, children do not want to lose their homes, their toys or their parents. They do not like losing control of themselves, or being punished.

“They are not setting fires to be bad,” Ms. Brix says. “I think that most of them are acting impulsively without thinking of what they’ll gain from it, or what the consequences will be. That’s why punishment won’t stop them.”

Indeed, fire department counselors have found that some punishments may increase the likelihood of future fires. One South Dallas woman held her son’s finger to a hot skillet until it blistered; a middle-class man forced his 8-year-old son to watch while he burned the boy’s phonograph in the family’s backyard; a rich North Dallas woman held her son’s hand in a candle flame to “prove” that fire was hot. In each case, the child later set more serious fires that eventually brought him to the fire department’s attention.

Bumpass’ method helped those children. Its most beautiful feature, as far as Preston and his colleagues were concerned, was its simplicity. They did not have to keep children from being angry or sad, they just had to help them find more acceptable outlets for their hostility or sorrow. They couldn’t stop the kids from lighting their first unsupervised fire, but they could stop fires two through 52. Since most children seemed to start outdoors and work their way inside their homes, that was an important goal. All they had to do was ask a few simple questions, listen carefully and make a few suggestions. Specifically, they drew up 31 questions for the kids and 24 for the parents.

“A lot of what we see is problems with the parents coming out through the kids,” Kevin Sipes says. Absence of the mother or father is a common triggering event for young fire setters. A month before the counseling program began, Preston got a call from a Dallas prostitute whose preschool son had ignited the curtains in her bedroom one morning when she would not get up and socialize with him. Earlier, he had set her hair on fire for the same reason. A 4-year-old boy came to Preston for some Christmas Eve counseling after a similar fire. The boy’s father was slaving at two full-time jobs and earning less than $1,000 a month after moving to Dallas from Pennsylvania, where he had been a skilled steelworker. He awoke one morning surrounded by flames. His son, who rarely got to speak to him any more, had set his mattress on fire. His life was saved by his alert 5-year-old daughter.

When a young child makes such a direct assault on his parents, it is safe to assume that he means to harm them. But he probably does not anticipate the extent of that harm; does not understand that Mommy, once burned to death, will stay dead.

Wealthier workaholic parents are not immune to such attacks. One Dallasite told Preston he would quit his new job as a plant foreman after learning that his longer hours caused his son to start setting fires around the house. A North Dallas husband and wife who were extremely successful at a family business had to adjust their hours after their 9-year-old son cratered their carpets with match burns.

Even parents who spend a great deal of time at home can dangerously neglect their children, as with the alcoholic mother whose sons set several fires in North Dallas apartments. Or the football-addict father whose rude dismissals of his sons – “Get the hell out of here, I’m trying to watch the game” – prompted the three, ages 6, 7 and 8, to torch the garage.

To help the parents sort out their family situations, the counselors send the child out of the room and ask for a medical and social history of the youngster. Then they ask questions about how the child is punished; how much time the parents spend with him each day; how often they tell him that they love him; whether he has been under unusual stress in the last six months; and what impression they think their child has of them.

The child is asked how well he gets along with his parents; how he would change them, if he could; what he most likes about his parents; whether he likes his brothers and sisters; and whether he ever hurt anyone on purpose. Using the graphing technique, he is asked why he set the fire, how many others he has set and whether he would like to stop.

Obviously, the fire department wants the kids to stop. So some of the questions are loaded. The parents are asked if they know that they can be held liable for damage caused by their children, up to $5,000. The children are asked how they plan to pay for the damage they have caused, and what their favorite possession is. If they say, “My teddy bear,” their counselor is likely to remind them, “If you have a fire, your teddy bear will be all burned up.”

As a rule, the children tell the firemen things they would never dream of telling their parents. Gloria Walker and her husband, for instance, thought that their son, Johnny, 6, had accidentally started a fire in their garage last August. That was what Johnny told them, and they believed him even though he had played with fire before, scarring the carpet in the Walkers’ comfortable East Dallas home.

Johnny told Sipes, however, that he awoke one morning and saw some boiled eggs that his mother was preparing for a party. He asked if he could eat one, and his mother said no, which made him sad. But he ate one anyway, which made him happy. Then his mother whipped him, which made him sad. He became angry and stalked out to the garage, where he knew his father kept a cigarette lighter. He tried lighting a mattress, but it would not catch. So he pulled some cotton stuffing out of it, lit the stuffing and dropped the cotton onto the mattress. After which he coolly sauntered out to talk to some friends, saw that the fire was waist-high and roared out of the driveway on his bicycle. He left his 2-year-old brother, Shannon, hiding in a corner of the garage. Shannon, of whom Johnny was quite jealous, was rescued by his mother, who was alerted by some nearby workmen.

Johnny told Sipes that he enjoyed being with his father, but that “Hus” Walker was seldom willing to play with him or go anywhere with him. His mother said that she loved him, Johnny added, but he wanted to hear that from his father, too. Hus Walker was surprised to hear that. “He sort of smiled and admitted that he never had said he loved us,” Mrs. Walker says. “He said he was the kind of man who tried to show his love for us by doing.”

The Walkers worked out a contract with Johnny. His father agreed to play basketball with him if Johnny helped with the yardwork. “He hasn’t started any fires since then,” Mrs. Walker says. “You can’t pay him to touch a match.” And, she adds, “He told Kevin a lot more than I thought he would.”

Sipes uses contracts sometimes for children who do not think that they are being treated fairly. Jealousy and the perception of unfairness – however ill-founded – have prompted several fires in the past six months.

Two days after Christmas, Preston got a call from a panicked couple whose 5-year-old son had nearly roasted them in their house trailer. The boy had played with fire before, but they thought nothing of it until they caught him that morning piling crumpled newspapers in the aisle of their trailer and lighting the pyramid. His parents were hard pressed for money and all Santa had left him for Christmas was a used bike with a rusty chain. When he rode it, the chain broke. His parents returned the bicycle and pocketed the refund. The boy, who had other problems with his parents, complained to Preston that “Santa gave me a bike and I had to take it back and he wouldn’t give me a new one.” Preston thought the child had a pretty good idea of who Santa was.

Naomi Reynolds counseled a 10-year-old boy this summer who, jealous that his younger siblings had gotten new clothes and he had not, burned the closet in which the clothes were stored and, coincidental-ly, destroyed the family’s home. A 4-year-old set a closet fire in Oak Cliff after his older brothers would not play with him; it, too, burned the family out of its home. Sipes handled the case of a 3-year-old boy who lighted his newborn sister’s crib on fire, though he had shown no previous signs of jealousy. (“No signs that the parents saw, anyway,” Bumpass says.) The baby was rescued from the blaze.

The counselors have modified Bumpass’ approach somewhat – using films before the interviews to stress the dangers of fire, and spending only about three weekly sessions with each child, instead of giving complete therapy. But so far their approach seems to be working. By mid-January they had counseled 110 children, only one of whom had set a fire after his sessions. It is too early to tell what effect the program will have on the city’s overall arson rate, but Preston says that juvenile arsons were down 24 percent in October, November and December, compared to the same three-month period in 1980. Adult arsons increased by 31.8 percent.

The program’s biggest problems so far seem to be public ignorance and parental stubbornness. Not everyone knows about the program, and many who do refuse to believe that their baby could be a firebug. Of seven girls referred for counseling by firefighters, arson investigators or school officials, only one girl’s parents agreed to participate in the program. Some parents of boys can be equally obtuse. One mother watched her 3-year-old son stroll out of his bedroom, closing the door behind him. In moments she smelled smoke; the fire department had to extinguish her son’s blazing bed. She refused counseling, Alcy Jackson recalls, on grounds that her son was not a fire setter. “She said, ’I didn’t actually see him set the fire.’ “

Other parents refuse to participate for fear that they will not collect their fire insurance if their insurance firm learns that the fire was set deliberately by their child. Preston says that he knows of no case where a claim has been denied because a small child set the fire.

Bumpass, Preston and their colleagues say that there are several ways parents can reduce their chances of being caught unawares by a young fire setter. Among them:

〈Keeping matches, cigarette lightersand flammable liquids out of reach ofyoung children.

〈Stressing that secret playing with fireis dangerous and will not be tolerated.

〈Recognizing that children are curiousabout fire and providing them with propersupervision and instruction about fire – using the fireplace perhaps – when theyare old enough to understand it.

〈Ensuring that children receive proper fire-safety training, including the “Stop, Drop and Roll” technique in case their clothes catch fire.

〈 Spending time with the children, nomatter how lousy the day has been. AlcyJackson calls it “lap time”; Royanna Brixstresses the importance of listening to thechildren and encouraging them to showtheir feelings.

〈 Enrolling children in extracurricularactivities, especially if the alternativewould be their coming home to an emptyhouse, which scares many youngsters.

〈 Watching for signs that a child hasbeen setting unsupervised fires. Signs include matchsticks or burn marks aroundbackyard fences, beneath hedges, in garages or anywhere inside a house.

“I was startled to see the great many kids who had set numerous fires before we even talked to them,” says Jane Lewis. “That doesn’t mean that none of them were curious and all of them were disturbed, but . . .”

“But what it does mean is that if parentscan get the kids to work with us early, wemay be able to help tell them if the fireswere just curiosity,” says Sipes. “Theparents often think it’s just curiosity, andthey may be right. But they may be wrong,and have their house burn up.”