Lawyers mull charges for Calif. fire-starting boy

updated 10:27 p.m. ET Nov. 1, 2007

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. - When arson investigators went looking for the person who set a blaze that scorched 60 square miles and destroyed 21 homes, Linda Conner says she knew right where to send them.

Minutes after the fire broke out, Conner said, she had raced up a hill toward the source of the flames. At the top, she saw a stunned-looking 10-year-old boy and his parents frantically trying to beat the flames down with towels.

“There’s no reason to talk to other people,” Conner, a horse trainer at the ranch where the fire started, recalled telling arson investigators. “You need to go straight up the road and talk to that boy.”

The 10-year-old quickly admitted he had been playing with matches.

On Thursday, as authorities considered whether to file criminal charges, neighbors gave conflicting accounts of the boy’s behavior.

Denise Tomey, who runs the Carousel Ranch where the boy lived in a small trailer with his family, described him as a quiet child who often played outside with his brother and the family’s small white and tan dog, Spike.

“From what I know, he’s a good kid,” said Tomey, executive director of the ranch, which provides riding lessons to developmentally disabled children. The boy’s father tends horses there and the boy attends a nearby school.

“He’s a child and I certainly believe that he had no malice, and I absolutely believe it was accidental,” Tomey said.

Neighbor: 'He's got a lot of problems'
Some neighbors, though, called the 10-year-old a troublesome child.

Linny Martin, who lives across the road, said she often caught him throwing rocks at her horses. When she yelled at him to stop, she said, he would run up the hill to his family’s trailer.

“He’s got a lot of problems,” Martin said.

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The boy’s name is being withheld. Legal experts say arson charges against him are unlikely, given that he may have been too young to understand how much damage his match-play could cause.

The fire he admitted starting was one of more than 15 that roared across a wide swath of Southern California last week, blackening 809 square miles from north of Los Angeles to the Mexican border and destroying more than 2,000 homes. Causes have ranged from arson to downed power lines to sparks set off by construction work.

The Santa Clarita fire, which started Oct. 21, was traced to an area just outside the boy’s hilltop trailer home. Neither the home nor the ranch was damaged.

The boy attended a nearby school. Tomey said she never saw him bring classmates home or play with any of the children on the ranch.

Authorities originally gave his age as 12, but a Los Angeles County sheriff’s spokesman said Thursday that was an error.

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