May 5-11, 2005

city beat

Pyro Techniques

blazing battles: Fire Department Capt. Mike Carroll took pride both in being a third-generation firefighter and his efforts to steer children away from arson. In January, however, he was transferred away from the unit, leaving the City's Juvenile Firestoppers Program in limbo.

As a child, Mike Carroll was a firebug. As an adult firefighter, he tried to stop kids from going down the same path -- until budget cuts got in the way.

by J.F. Pirro

While coordinating the city's Juvenile Firestoppers Program, Mike Carroll would look young firebugs straight in their eyes, which were often filled with tears. Then, he'd plead with each one. "You have to promise me," he'd say during those interventions, "you will not mess around with fire!"

"If I had to, I'd grab his face," Carroll recalls, "but at the end, I'd shake his hand and say, "You're taking a big step forward.' Then I'd make him hug his mother and father, and say, "With that hug, I'm going to tell my chief there's no longer a problem at 123 Elm St.'"

During a decade that damn near drained him, Carroll went through that process hundreds of times for his job in the Fire Department's Fire Prevention Division.

He met with kids like Robert*, who as a 3-year-old watched his mother disappear then witnessed his distraught father shoot himself. (*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of fire-setters intervention program participants.)

By age 13, Robert routinely set fires at home and in his Olney neighborhood, even threatening to burn down his parochial grade school. In 1999, a vacant two-story factory on his block burned down in a fire ruled arson, although it was never linked to him.

"Every time we went to question him, his grandmother moved him to his grandfather's home in Upper Darby," says Carroll of that troubled youth, who is now living in Fishtown. "Then, a supermarket on his grandfather's block burned down. It, too, was ruled arson, but no one was ever connected to the crime."

Then, there was Mary*, who at age 11 in 2000 repeatedly set fires to get a rise out of a wicked stepmother. And Vincent*, who after turning 11 in 2001 began setting gasoline fires with his 6-year-old brother in their back yard off Roosevelt Boulevard whenever the two were home alone.

"We tried to provide a safety net," says Carroll.

But since recently being transferred away from a job that seemed custom-made for him, Carroll wonders whether the city can do enough to identify and treat these troubled children before it's too late. The safety net is starting to fray.

"Whether we caught them or not," he concedes, "the point is we did the best we could."

Through his promotion to captain in March last year, the 52-year-old helped protect Philadelphians and their property by probing the minds of young firebugs. But when the captain's position in Fire Prevention became a budgetary casualty in January, Carroll was reassigned to the Technical Services Unit. Today, he sits in front of a computer rather than looking into the souls of troubled children.

The budget cuts halted all overtime pay in Fire Prevention, which Carroll says is a problem considering that of about 150 juvenile firesetters who come through the program annually, he says 120 would require overtime, or evening hours, to be interviewed.

"That's a lot of children who won't now get served," he says. While a $40,000 grant temporarily restored that service, there was a three-month gap last year during which the department couldn't visit kids at night. Plus, without Carroll's presence, there are questions about leadership in Fire Prevention — and in the city's juvenile firesetting program, which is yet another city service that's been slashed.

In Philadelphia Fire Department history, the Carroll name dates to 1920. Mike's father, Charles Carroll, was a fire captain like his father, Charles, before him. When Mike, now a 32-year veteran, turned 21, he became the only one of Charlie Carroll's 14 kids who would take the fireman's oath. There had to be a queasy feeling that day, though.

Carroll had insight into what the kids were thinking. As a child, he says he, too, set a bunch of fires. They nearly gutted his family's good name.

"All the firefighters knew us," Carroll recalls. "They'd say, "Hey, you're Charlie Carroll's boys.' They'd say, "Oh, you're doing this again,' then they'd let us help put the fires out, then reel in the hose. We thought we were a big deal, so naturally we'd do it again."

Between the ages of 8 and 12, Carroll says he and a brother and some friends set 50 to 60 small fires in the public park near their parent's home at 68th and Malvern in West Philly.

"Eventually," Mike now says, "we got tired of it and stopped."

Each time, the city's firemen protected them, he says — not only from the fire but also from their father, who turned 77 yesterday.

"To this day," Mike says, "my father doesn't know I set any fires."

Had he been a child today, however, his secret probably would have gotten out sooner.

Nationally, children set more than 100,000 fires a year that cause 350 deaths, 2,800 injuries and more than $280 million in damage. Minors account for 51 percent of arson arrests, according to FBI data. Among the top 10 crimes in the FBI index, arson is the only one for which the percentage of juvenile offenders is higher than that of adults.

Between 1999 and 2002 alone, the city's Juvenile Firestoppers Program (JFS) staff conducted intervention interviews with 727 juveniles who set fires that caused seven deaths and more than $3 million in damage. The 190 referrals in 1999 represented a 68 percent increase from the previous year. In 2001, that number jumped to 213. In the four-year period, the sections of the city that produced the most referrals were Kingsessing (49), Nicetown (46), Frankford (44) and Port Richmond (43).

There are many reasons why kids start fires, Carroll says, but behavioral problems are common. Many have attention-deficit, hyperactivity or oppositional disorders. Most are unsuccessful in school. Many have poor self-esteem or are less socially skilled. Many feel rejected or isolated. Some act out in response to peer pressure or gang requirements. Some seek revenge. Set a fire, you get instant reaction and attention.

JFS programs are reactive by nature, since people like Carroll don't get into the mix until a child sets a fire and is referred to the program. All existing programs begin with an immediate interview after parents have signed a required consent. Some fire personnel interview in a suit; others do so in casual attire. Carroll took a different approach; he wore the full uniform.

"The badge and the uniform bring a sense of authority, then I'd talk about something of interest to them — fire," he says, as if he's still directly involved. "That's when they really start to open up, and we can begin to try to understand their cry for help."

Considering those statistics and theories, it's easy to understand why fire-prevention types like Carroll no longer take a "boys will be boys approach" to addressing the issue. Today, the slightest red flag gets them involved.

"If there's no intervention, research says that child who first flicks his Bic to paper, then moves to field brush, then farmer Jones' shed, and then the abandoned factory in town goes up in smoke," explains Paul Reichenbach, chairman of the state's Juvenile Firesetter Advisory Group.

Reichenbach is also public-education information specialist for the Office of the State Fire Commissioner, which recently received a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security so Pennsylvania fire officials could launch a new juvenile anti-arson initiative. Last month, that money funded a two-day training session at the Montgomery County Fire Academy in Conshohocken. It represented a first-time statewide effort to direct more unified resources to a multidisciplinary approach toward preventing juvenile firesetting.

Keynote speaker B. Dan Dillard, the executive director of the Burn Prevention Foundation in Allentown who launched an intervention program two years ago, said, "The time has never been more perfect to start a juvenile firesetting program. With more and more kids responsible for their own supervision, it's foolish to think this problem is going to become less severe."

While those who took over for Carroll after his transfer attended those sessions, they didn't respond to City Paper requests for comment on what they learned and what direction their initiative could take here.

Carroll says the current JFS crew of nine, headed by Lt. Mike Grant, is "thin on experience," but he says he hears from the others that progress was made in connecting with the city's mental-health professionals. It could lead to a partnership, but like Carroll says, "even the mental-health community has trouble dealing with firesetters; they scare everybody."

Arsons in Philadelphia
Year	#
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004	2,581 2,249 2,148 1,770 1,691
Arson Damage
Year	$ in Millions
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004	$12.2 $11.6 $11.2 $8.2 $7.6
Arson Deaths/Arson Incidents
Year	Deaths/Incidents
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004	12 / 10 7 / 5 7 / 3 7 / 4 8 / 3
Last year a firefighter died in an arson fire: 1984 Data courtesy Lt. Art Czajkowski, Philadelphia Fire Department.

Although Carroll, who hasn't conducted an intervention in more than a year, says he tried to make a difference, the program he inherited and bequeathed often left his hands tied. Increasingly, the troubled youth he served needed more and better mental-health services as less and less funding became available.

Carroll sometimes relied on help from peers in Bucks County because Philadelphia "didn't move fast enough." Nick Rafferty, Bucks' assistant fire marshal and director of its Fire PAC (Fire Professionals Aiding Children) program, pitched in on a half dozen city cases.

"I can't say we can do more [in Bucks]," says Rafferty, who has 400 of his own interventions, or 60 a year, under his belt. "The city does a good job with what it has, but when there's a vast political arena in place; I'll tell you this much, they have a program, and they had an amazing guy like Mike Carroll who had a heart for the kids and the community."

Carroll says he could always speak to a "curious" child, but any categorical designation beyond that — the firebugs who really needed help — always led to a dead-end.

"All I could do was hand the family a slip of paper and ask them to take him to a mental-health facility," he says. In 1996, "I remember telling [former Fire Commissioner] Harold Hairston that the program stinks. I asked him, "How am I supposed to help a kid when I don't know if he ever goes for further help?'"

A week later, Hairston also put Carroll on Philadelphia's Interdisciplinary Youth Fatality Review Team, which studies deaths of city residents under age 22. The assignment allowed him to make contacts that could help with the anti-arson initiatives.

"By the second meeting, I was talking to police there, the mental-health department and other people I needed," Carroll says.

Still, few residential treatment facilities open their doors to child firebugs. Northwest Center in Mt. Airy, with which Carroll once partnered, no longer accepts firesetters (its expert recently left for another job). The Joseph J. Peters Institute at 100 S. Broad St., which specializes in sexual abuse assessment and treatment, has expressed interest in dovetailing a program for the city's youthful firesetters, but without funding it's yet to materialize, according to CEO Ted Glackman.

"We were on the way to a groundbreaking program where we could have used our fire-setting program as a referral into mental health," Carroll says, "but a lot changed [budgetwise] since the beginning of the year."

Philadelphia's program has a critic in at least one renowned expert. Dian Williams is founder and president of the Center for Arson Research, which habitually relocates to undisclosed Philadelphia-area locations, a security measure considering she's an arson profiler, educator and expert witness. A forensic nurse with a doctorate in criminology, Williams was among the nation's first to profess that firesetting was more than simple bad behavior.

"Sometimes she just gets the worst of them," says Carroll of Williams, who wrote a textbook titled Understanding the Arsonist: From Assessment to Concession. "She deals with the kids with the secret rooms and Nazi artifacts and other strange stories."

Known for handling cases involving bizarre sexual or physical abuse or neglect of youngsters, she's scheduled to give a lecture called "Profiles of Arson: Pathologies of Firesetters and Implications for Treating Survivors" at the Psychiatric Nursing Update and Gerontologic Nursing Conference, which is in town in two weeks.

While Williams was involved in adapting the city's first intervention program in 1985, she says Philly's interest in her services has "dissipated." (On background, experts in the field say Williams has to carry some of the blame because building up the national reputation of her center sometimes took precedent over cooperating with the local authorities. Williams' didn't return calls or e-mails for additional comment after granting one telephone interview.)

"When I lecture anywhere in the world, I'm always asked if Philadelphia has a program," she said. "I refer to Camden and Delaware, but I can't say much about Philadelphia's. It's embarrassing to me that I never have anything good to say about the city."

Thanks to the recent Conshohocken training session, however, pessimism could be giving way to renewed hope. Five more conferences will follow during the next18 months, courtesy of the $55,000 in grant money from the Homeland Security Department and the fire commissioner's office.

"There was always the problem, but we never had all the solutions," says the OSFC's Reichenbach. "Now, we feel we do."

State Fire Commissioner Ed Mann aims to foster regionally based interagency cooperation across the commonwealth to help identify and treat young firestarters.

Ironically, Philadelphia's program — in place since the mid-1980s — was ahead of the curve in doing much of what the new initiative aims to do. Still, Carroll sees the benefits of what's happening, even though he's no longer in the trenches.

"It's like we're finally bringing everyone into the family," explains Carroll, who says training can only be enhanced with a state-led universal approach despite the city's cutbacks. "In a sense, April was an affirmation."

On the front end, the plan outlined at the session takes a multidisciplinary approach similar to the program updated by Carroll in 1999 in Philadelphia, albeit with more support and resources. It would scatter regional JFS programs across the state and use a standardized statewide evaluation tool.

Each region would cover an area with a population of 500,000 people. Montgomery and Delaware counties still don't have this type of comprehensive program. Bucks and Chester counties do, but coordinators there still find themselves selling parents on the need for intervention and increasingly involving the courts. From there, each program's statistics could be used to lobby politicians for additional funding.

Addressing Carroll's concerns about a lack of follow-up and support, cases would be reviewed by a multidisciplinary team (MDT) of fire-service personnel, school systems, mental-health professionals, social workers, children and youth social-service workers, juvenile justice probation officers and law enforcement. The MDT would provide specific suggestions for appropriate intervention.

"We can't have cops saying, "I'm not talking with you because you're a fireman,' or the firemen saying to the cops, "We don't need you,'" Reichenbach says. "We have to get over all that."

Bucks County's Rafferty, who taught at the April workshops, suggests a state domestic tax to fund JFS programs like his. Such a tax could generate enough monies for full-time, proactive coordinators and educators, but for the time being, it remains just an idea.

"If we start with this now, then what could happen in a generation," Rafferty asks. "Is this worthwhile to a community as a whole? You're damn right it is."

It's hard to say what the future will hold for Philadelphia's juvenile anti-arson efforts, but in all, Rafferty says intervention programs are "Band-Aids."

"If we want to get at this, we need to get into the family structure," he says at a Friendly's, illustrating his point with two knives, a fork and a spoon, arranging them in the shape of a diamond. "It's a cycle of dysfunctionality. The purpose of a JFS program is to break the cycle."

But what's a parent to do? Rafferty suggests "love" as the cure. Carroll says parents of firesetters are too unforgiving. They "walk the floors" day and night. He also remains mystified by the "absolute lack of emotion" he's seen in so many firesetters.

"This is like a chronic disease," he says. "It never goes away. Even if it does, it's still in the back of your mind."

Carroll's transfer out of the program brought satisfaction, frustration and maybe even catharsis for his own "curious" childhood.

"I'd still like to be involved, but others have to pick it up," he says. "Still, I don't know if they'll be allowed to spend the amount of time it takes.

"I think the overriding concern is the lack of training and resources for troubled children. Our program was designed to counsel curious children, but as our clientele became more and more troubled, there came a frustration. Parents want the magic pill that makes their kid OK, but we don't have it. It takes a committed parent, and that might mean going through Junior's pockets every day, or invading Junior's privacy and being confrontational. It's all uncomfortable but necessary if we're going to protect our kids."

Curing Eric Two years ago, when Donna* found her oldest son's "fire video," an unlikely volunteer fireman came to her family's rescue. His name was Samir P. Ashmar, a banker who puts out fires in the small-business-loan-gone-bad world by day but serves as a fire educator for Allentown's Burn Prevention Foundation by night. In the words of Kathy Ray, the foundation's prevention education director, Ashmar's a "saint." A 41-year-old who was born in Beirut, he's vice president of special assets management for a major Philadelphia banking firm. He commutes from his home in suburban Allentown. Eric*, Donna's then-14-year-old son, was in the first batch of juvenile fire-setter referrals Ashmar met at Goodwill Fire Co. No. 1 in Trexlertown. "Sam treated Eric like an adult," Donna, 38, says. "He didn't baby him. He didn't criticize him for what he'd done. Sam was such a positive influence on him, I'm no longer concerned." That wasn't always the case. In Eric's video, he was burning trash and towels in a can outside a now-estranged schoolmate's house. The boy's older sister was also in on it. "They were laughing and making comments that really disturbed me," says Donna, who also has two younger sons. First, she called the friend's father. He watched the video but wouldn't confront his children with it. So, Donna called Eric on it. "We were new to the area, and we had to let him know that behavior wasn't going to fly," she says. "The other family ignored it in hopes it'd go away. I hope it did." Following eight 45-minute fire-education sessions, Eric has done "a complete turn around," says Donna. He's even begun volunteering at firehouse fund-raisers and open houses. He wants to be a part-time fireman like Ashmar, who like 95 percent of those who serve in the state's 2,460 fire companies, is a volunteer. But can Ashmar know whether Eric is really cured? "You really don't," he says. "All you can do is pass along the information and hope and pray each child will do the right thing." As of late April, Ashmar had counseled more than 20 young firebugs. He calls Eric his "star pupil" but says he knows "people out there are going to say I'm whacked to have made friends with a kid that set fires." The day he spoke with City Paper, Ashmar was chipping away at another list of referrals. Odds are that five of the eight will buy into the program. Others won't return his calls. One family might make an appointment, then not show. Thanks to those uncertainties, Ray worries that Ashmar and the other educators may not stick around in the job for all that long. Ashmar and his wife, Sharon, have two of their own children, Makala, 13, and Joshua, 9. "Sam has his own family, and his time is valuable," she says, "so how long is it going to take before he says, "I've had enough'?" But Ashmar says Ray needn't worry about his commitment. His community service is motivated by a daughter who died shortly after her birth. "She's my goal," Ashmar says. "I want to make sure I get to heaven so I can see her again. Because of her, all children are my passion."