Excerpts from the ChicagoTribune.com
A Ford Heights volunteer firefighter was arrested Wednesday and charged with three counts of arson for allegedly setting afire three vacant homes in the village.
Kaumain Allen, 19, appeared in bond court Wednesday at the Markham Courthouse where he was arraigned on three separate counts of arson and issued a $120,000 bond.
Authorities began investigating Allen, who was a candidate to become a paid firefighter, after a patrol officer on Monday found him at a vacant home on 15th Street in Ford Heights, according to a Cook County Sheriff’s Department press release. Allen told the officer, who was conducting a premise check at the residence, that the fire department had sent him to retrieve some equipment they left behind. Investigators later learned that the fire department did not send him or authorize him to be in the vacant house.
In court Wednesday investigators said that Allen started the first fire on Jan. 18 in the 1400 block of Congress Lane after he entered the vacant home and made a pile of trash which he then set on fire.
… the second and third fires [were] in the 1500 block of Congress Lane. On Feb. 9, he allegedly entered an abandoned residence with a can of gasoline that he poured on a pile of debris against a back wall before using a pocket lighter to start the fire. On March 3, he allegedly took a handheld propane torch to an empty home, set a road flare on fire with the torch and threw it into another pile of debris starting the structure on fire.
Allen responded with the fire department on all three fires. He told investigators and fellow firefighters that he happened to be working in the area when the fires broke out which is why he was able to respond so quickly to assist with the calls, Campbell said.
The Cook County Sheriff’s police along with the State Fire Marshall’s office have been investigating a rash of fires in Ford Heights since October of last year. There have been a total of 11 fires in vacant homes and two car fires in the past six months.
