Arson rampage in Canton damages homes, rips apart lives

By LORI MONSEWICZ

Canton Repository

CANTON

A day after fire destroyed their home, Timothy Foerster and his daughter walked into their gutted kitchen looking for whatever survived the blaze.

He found a box containing pictures of his wife, Jennifer Wolfe, who died in 2005. He also found the brass urn filled with her ashes.

A few minutes later, their 15-year-old daughter, Amber Wolfe, emerged from another room inside the two-story wooden-frame home at 815 Michael Place SW. She carried a singed copy of the popular vampire novel “New Moon.”

“It’s still readable,” the Canton Timken High School student said. “My ‘LeBron James’ [biography] is destroyed!’’

Firefighters say someone purposely burned their home early Wednesday, and at the same time, a vacant house less than a block away. That fire also spread to a home next door.

Thomas and Erika Williams and their daughter, Tommia Williams, also 15, awoke and escaped their burning home at 624 Marion Ave. SW.

Wednesday’s fires were the latest in a string of recent arsons in Canton, firefighters say.

A reward of up to $5,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible is being offered by the Ohio Blue Ribbon Arson Committee through the Canton Fire Department.

Division Chief John Whitlatch said that though some of the houses that recently burned were vacant, “they are often in close proximity to occupied homes.”

The fires on Michael Place and Marion Avenue have displaced two families from their homes, and they are fortunate nothing worse happened.’

Foerster said he thinks someone mistook his house for vacant after he replaced two broken first-floor windows with paneling. During the fire, he also had noticed that a tire from his front porch had been pushed under one of the windows, he said.

Last week, someone set fire to a vacant duplex at 610 Rose Court NW.

And on May 8, firefighters were called to 200 Collins Court NW, where the flames also had ignited a neighboring house at 1317 Second St. NW. Both homes were vacant. That same night, less than two blocks away, a vacant warehouse on McGregor Avenue NW was set ablaze.

According to Canton Building Department records, the city had 1,686 homes listed as being vacant as of April 15. That figure does not include many more that are not on city records.

Foerster’s daughter has known only one home. It was where she was living when she survived cancer — non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma — at 9 years old. It was her home at age 11 when her mother died Feb. 5, 2005.

And it still was her home at 1 a.m. Wednesday when her father rushed her from their burning house. He also ran back inside to save her dog, Bella, whom she named for a lead character in the “Twilight” book series.

The teen said that though she doesn’t understand why someone would want to burn down her house, she has an invitation for whoever set the fire: “They can come to my church. They obviously need God in their heart.” She attends Faith Bible Church on Firestone Road NE.

“I look at this [fire experience]two ways,’ she said. ‘It’s a bad thing because everything’s destroyed. It’s a good thing because we can start all over again.”