Suspects arrested in church arsons

It sounds like the three young arsonists may have had no real motive other than thrill-seeking. From this AP report (which appeared today in the Decatur Daily):

Benjamin Nathan Moseley of Birmingham and Russell Lee DeBusk Jr. of Hoover, both 19 and theater students at Birmingham-Southern College, and Matthew Lee Cloyd, 20, of Indian Hills, a friend and student at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, were charged in the rash of church fires last month.

Federal agents said Moseley admitted to the arsons after his arrest Wednesday, the day after a tire track, picked up as evidence in the probe, was traced to Cloyd. DeBusk also confessed, court documents show. ...

The three suspects rode with Cloyd to shoot deer in Bibb County the night the first fire was set, according to a sworn statement by a federal agent who investigated the fires, Walker Johnson.

Cloyd told a witness they set fire to a church "as a joke and it got out of hand," according to Johnson, who works for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Moseley later told agents that burning additional churches became "too spontaneous" after they saw fire trucks rushing by.

Four days after burning five churches in Bibb County, Moseley and Cloyd traveled to West Alabama and set fire to four more churches "as a diversion to throw investigators off," according to Johnson's statement.

"Moseley said the diversion obviously did not work," said the affidavit. ...

Moseley and DeBusk are theater students at Birmingham-Southern, a small liberal arts school affiliated with the United Methodist Church. Cloyd formerly attended the same school but transferred to UAB.

Two other AP stories have more on the students' backgrounds: see here and here.

Birmingham-Southern College has suspended Moseley and Debusk, and the college president has pledged to help rebuild the churches.