Peeples’s church, its elementary school and day-care center were totally destroyed on the night of Nov. 11–the latest and worst of six separate church fires in Gainesville since January. Six churches were burned early this year in Winter Haven, midway between Tampa and Orlando near Interstate 4. In Ocala, south of I-75, an arsonist caused $4 million damage to the First Baptist Church on Oct. 24. The same night, someone also tried to burn down the First Presbyterian Church of Ocala, but the fire went out.
Frustrated and alarmed by their inability to stop the series of arsons despite hundreds of seemingly substantial leads, authorities have offered rewards totaling $46,000 for tips. In February the state insurance commissioner, Tom Gallagher, formed a task force to coordinate a small army of state, local and federal investigators. But Gallagher and other officials now say they do not believe that one person touched off all the fires. “We are trying to tie some of the fires together,” Gallagher said. “Maybe there are one or two people [who started] doing the fires, and we ended up with a lot of copycats.”
The copycat theory was one reason why Gallagher and other officials downplayed the arrest, last week, of the first identified suspect in the chain of arsons. Officials said Patrick Lee Frank, 41, of the Chattanooga, Tenn., area was being held in the Marion County jail on charges of trespassing in a vacant Gainesville house. Frank, released from a Tennessee prison in 1989, was arrested the day after the fire that burned down the Westwood Church of God, and sources said he had been under surveillance by task-force investigators for some time. But Bruce Snyder of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said there are still other suspects in the case, and he warned police and church officials not to relax their guard. That left thousands of churchgoers to worry whether their houses of worship would ever be safe-and investigators wondering when the firebugs would strike next.
