Word: birmingham
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Federal agents last week arrested three college students from the prosperous Birmingham suburbs--sons of a doctor, a constable and a plant manager--accusing them of setting ablaze nine churches, home to both black and white congregations, in the rural counties around Birmingham in February. "It's hard to believe it was these kinds of kids," says Greene County sheriff Johnny Isaac. Most expected a troubled loner to emerge as the suspect. A volunteer firefighter pleaded guilty to an earlier series of burnings in 1996; a self-professed Satanist is in prison for similar crimes...
Instead, the three alleged arsonists, who have all been charged with federal conspiracy to burn churches, were popular college kids with big dreams and real talents. Matthew Cloyd, 20, was a premed student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, to which he transferred last year. An avid deer hunter and a high school math-honor-society student, Cloyd remained close to two friends he met during his freshman and sophomore years at Birmingham-Southern College, Russell DeBusk and Benjamin Moseley. The 19-year-old theater majors were a tight pair at the small liberal-arts school, which is affiliated...
...setting rural Alabama churches on fire. Three years later, self-professed Satanist Jay Ballinger was arrested for setting churches on fire in Alabama and other states. He?s serving a federal life sentence. So it came as quite a shock to law enforcement and residents alike Wednesday when three Birmingham, Alabama-area college students, all from upscale families and students at a private, religious-based college, were arrested for allegedly setting nine rural Baptist churches on fire in February."It's hard to believe it was these kinds of kids," says Greene County Sheriff Johnny Isaac. "It makes...
...According to court documents filed Wednesday in Alabama, Russell Lee DeBusk Jr., 19, Benjamin Nathan Moseley, 19, and Mathew Lee Cloyd, 20, say they set five small, isolated churches about 50 miles southwest of their Birmingham homes ablaze Feb. 3 as a joke after a night of deer hunting and drinking. Then they set four similar churches on fire Feb. 7 some 100 miles west of Birmingham to try to throw investigators off any clues. Instead, identical tire tracks from Cloyd?s Toyota 4Runner ultimately led investigators to the threesome. Moseley, Cloyd and DeBusk are all being held on federal...
...three suspects grew up in upscale Birmingham suburbs of Vestavia and Hoover, the former the neighborhood of ex-Healthsouth CEO Richard Scrushy, one of Birmingham?s richest and most notorious residents, who beat federal white-collar crime charges last year of cooking Healthsouth?s books. The suspects knew each other from attending Birmingham-Southern College, a private and exclusive liberal arts college affiliated with the United Methodist Church since its founding in 1856. Moseley and DeBusk were fellow drama and theater students at Birmingham-Southern, which has a small enrollment of 1,500 students. Cloyd also attended Birmingham-Southern before...