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What may have been teenage mischief resulted in a series of arson fires in Roanoke, and now police are looking for the people who started them.
Police think these fires are related.
Officers responded to the fires within an hour-and-a-half. They were all within a mile of one another.
People affected by the fires say they believe they were random, but that doesn't ease any of their frustrations.
Roanoke City Police say this looks like a harmful case of Friday Night fun for some young men.
Police are still looking for three young men who eyewitnesses saw fleeing one of the four fires set late Friday night and early Saturday morning.
Firefighters and police first responded to a car fire on Angell Avenue in Northeast Roanoke.
A half-hour later there was another car fire on Huntington Avenue.
“When I heard it was the 600 block of Huntington there's only two houses on this block and I kind of figured it was my neighbors garage and I'd hate to think of everything I have burning up in my garage,” David Smith said
Smith and his neighbors' homes weren't touched.
The next door neighbor is disabled. If his house caught on fire he probably couldn't have gotten out.
An employee at a petroleum supply company across the street who left his truck parked over night wasn't so lucky. Parts of the building were also damaged.
Then a half-hour later police and fire crews responded to a trailer fire on Pearl Avenue.
Robert Divers is the owner of a vehicle repair shop and the owner of this motor home, a long-term fix-up-project.
“Well it solved the problem of when I was going to finish the restoration on the motor home,” Robert Divers said.
He's trying to keep a sense of humor about his lost vehicle and damaged garage.
“This comes under the heading of major annoyance, not to mention 1000 dollar deductible on the building since I have to pay out of pocket for the building,” Divers said.
To give you an idea of how close these fires were to one another, the Winnebago fire was called in at 12:07 a.m., and then officers were called across the street just 13 minutes later.
Firefighters saw an abandoned house on Plantation Road go up in flames as they were responding to the trailer fire. But there wasn’t enough time to catch the people who created chaos in this neighborhood.
No one was hurt in any of these fires.
