Portland Officer Josiah Keefer was questioning Phillip Caron about why he was inside a half-built commercial building in the middle of the night when the officer heard a “rushing sound” and saw an orange glow growing inside the building.
Caron, 25, took off running. Police caught him nearby, but by the time firefighters arrived at 767 Forest Ave., the building was engulfed in flames and was ultimately destroyed.
In a police interview room later, Caron rolled on the floor, banged his head on the ground and sobbed to police, “Kill me now.” He was charged with arson in the Aug. 20 fire and it was not his first time.
It had been 17 months since Caron was freed from state prison following his conviction in 2005 for a series of arson fires that did almost $1.5 million in damage.
At the time, Caron was described as someone who had displayed behavioral problems and fire-setting behavior since he was a young child. Family members – including his father, a Westbrook deputy fire chief – had hoped he would get the treatment he needed when he was released.
Caron’s alleged penchant for setting fires is a rare but problematic condition, leading some officials to wonder whether he can ever be trusted outside a secure facility.
“As compassionate as we want to be or intervene to change behaviors, is there a point or is there a person where none of these things is going to work, so the safest thing for society is for them to be put away,” said the state’s Deputy Fire Marshal Joseph Thomas, a former Portland fire chief.
“My experience has been that when they get to that extent of a motivation, the likelihood of recidivism is so high that in many cases this is an individual that just needs to be off the streets,” he said.
Arson fires are usually simple vandalism or are set out of anger, for retaliation, or as an insurance fraud.
Portland Fire Chief Fred LaMontagne said most of Portland’s arsons are fires set to cover up other crimes. He said the city does not have any significant unsolved arson fires that occurred in the past year and a half.
Fires attributed to mental illness account for only a small percentage of the intentionally set fires, according to law enforcement and insurance industry statistics. And the emotional infatuation with fire is rarer still.
Caron’s lawyer, Jon Gale, said he wants to make sure his client is treated fairly and suggested that if the state proves Caron set the recent fire, prison isn’t necessarily the most sensible option.
“If somebody is compelled to start fires, that is something very different than somebody who starts fires with an alternative motive,” Gale said.
“If he suffers from a mental condition that for some unknown reason compels him to do this, you want to find him help not punishment,” Gale said.
In many cases, there is nothing that can help, said Dian Williams, head of the Center for Arson Research Inc. and a leading authority on arson.
“Prison is only an interruption in their fire-setting behavior,” Williams said.
She said she could not comment on Caron’s case specifically without conducting an in-depth analysis.
Williams believes attributing fires to mental illness suggests that people can be treated, or at least their behavior managed, perhaps with medication. That may be the case when arsonists have schizophrenia and voices are telling them to burn things, she said. But most fire-setting attributable to mental illness actually stems from personality disorders that are an integral part of a person’s makeup, she said.
People who set fires out of revenge are often suspicious and angry at the world out of proportion to any slight or misfortune they may have suffered and are obsessed with getting even, she said. They might set fire to the company that laid them off or an ex-girlfriend’s home, she said.
Fire setters she described as thrill-seeking often start at a very young age and will say they set fires because they are bored. The size of the fire and amount of damage often escalates.
They often report the fire themselves as part of a game where they know the secret about the fire and none of the emergency personnel responding do, giving them a feeling of superiority, she said.
Many arsonists do get away with it, at least for a while. Williams notes that only 17 percent of arson fires are prosecuted.
COMING TO LIGHT
Caron’s fire-setting behavior became public knowledge when he was arrested in 2004 after setting fire to a garage on Hicks Street in Portland. A Westbrook call firefighter was among the first on the scene. A Portland officer hustled a woman and her daughter to safety from the adjacent house.
The investigation eventually linked Caron to a spectacular fire at the Longview Farm barn in Gorham earlier that year, a construction site in Westbrook and a shed at the Sweetser Home in Saco, a school for children with behavioral problems that he had once attended.
Caron pled guilty to four counts of arson and was sentenced to 12 years in prison, all but four years of which were suspended. That means he was released after four years, but if he commits new crimes, he could be returned to prison for up to eight more years in addition to whatever sentence he would be given for the new crimes.
While in prison, Caron should have had access to some behavioral counseling on controlling destructive impulses, but not treatment geared specifically to setting fires, according to the Department of Corrections.
Caron was released from prison in March 2008, and was placed on probation, which required him to avoid alcohol and drugs and to get psychological counseling. He was charged with violating that probation in June after he was arrested on a charge of driving drunk in Scarborough.
He served about a month in jail, and was released July 10. Court papers say he has been living with his parents in Westbrook.
A person answering the telephone at their home declined to speak with a reporter. Caron, who is being held without bail in Cumberland County Jail, declined an interview request.
Caron told police he was inside 767 Forest Ave. because it looked like a good spot to drink beer, according to court papers. Police confiscated a lighter.
He also is being investigated in connection with a fire set the same night to a pile of railroad ties near Bishop Street.
If convicted in last month’s fire, Caron’s criminal history suggests that, if convicted of the Aug. 20 fire, the sanction of prison may not be effective.
“Where the person has been jailed and everything else, at some point when you see the next fire, you have to think to yourself none of this has worked,” Thomas said.
“If that person is not removed from society, it’s only a matter of time before somebody innocent or the person … gets hurt or killed,” he said.
ARSONIST WHO KILLED
Thomas recalls vividly the reign of Ashton L. Moores, whose first arson fire was in a Lubec sardine factory in 1966. He was guilty or implicated in 18 fires in the years afterward, including one in Orono that killed a man, despite spending much of his adult life in prison.
Caron could face a maximum of up to 20 years in prison, even though nobody was injured.
Caron is scheduled to undergo an inpatient psychological assessment, also called a Stage 3 evaluation, at the Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta.
“Sometimes the court identifies a very specific question, like is the defendant able to display the skills for competence” to stand trial, said Ann Leblanc, director of the State Forensic Service, which conducts the evaluations.
“The next most common (purpose) is for an assessment of factors that might have affected the defendant’s state of mind at the time of the allegation and that relates to criminal responsibility,” Leblanc said.
The state forensic service does not recommend sentencing, she said.
Caron’s lawyer, Jon Gale, suggested that criminal responsibility could end up being a component of Caron’s defense.
“If it’s a case for trial, it’s possible the issue is whether or not he had the mental capacity to understand what he did,” Gale said.
Deciding how to handle serial arsonists is a challenge for the criminal justice system, one it may not be able to handle, says Williams of the Center for Arson Research. And the implications could be severe.
“Fire setters, more than virtually any other criminal, endanger all of us,” she said. Regardless of the personal safety precautions one takes, “You’re not worried about one lone guy with a match who will show up and set fire to your front door and then just leave. He only needs a second.”