Police link suspect to multiple school arsons

The accused doesn’t go to school anywhere, a detective said.

STAFF REPORT

WARREN — A city detective says he thinks the 17-year-old Beck Street boy charged with setting fires at and near John F. Kennedy High School on Sept. 24 was probably also involved in earlier fires at the school but did not act alone.

Detective Pat Marsico, the city’s environmental enforcement officer, said the boy admitted to setting a fire in a metal trash container next to the school Sept. 24 and was charged this week with that crime in Trumbull County Family Court.

Howland police charged him earlier with setting fires at houses on Orchard and Fairview avenues the same night.

He is being held in Trumbull County Juvenile Justice Center on the charges.

Marsico, who is also an assistant football coach at John F. Kennedy High School, said he had seen the boy with others around his age in the vicinity of the high school’s practice football field.

He remembers having to speak to the boy and his friends on one occasion after the boys threw things at the football players during a practice.

Marsico said the boy lives in the Warren school district but had not been attending school anywhere this year. Beck Street is just west of the high school, which is on Central Parkway Southeast.

The school has been hit with arsons six times since Aug. 1, 2007, the most serious of them being a wooden storage shed that was destroyed July 1, 2008. The loss was in the thousands to the shed and sports equipment inside.

The metal shed purchased to replace it was also hit by arson on Sept. 13, destroying all but the metal parts of the sports equipment inside.