And what do I care?
"Brookline arson yields mystery. Not who did it, but why?; Cellphone calls, texts lead to suspect, but motive murky" by Anne Steele, Libby Leyden-Sussler and Amanda Ostuni | Globe Correspondents, December 08, 2013
They were just two of many emergency 911 calls on July 26, one suburban and the other in Boston, three miles apart and seemingly unrelated.
In the Chestnut Hill section of Brookline, a fire fueled by accelerants quickly engulfed an unfinished home on Spooner Road, a developer’s $2 million dream turned nightmare after three state courts declared it should never have been built.
Forty-five minutes later in a Jamaica Plain condominium, paramedics and police officers found 29-year-old Stephen J. McCann, badly burned, writhing in pain, much of his skin peeling off, wrapped in a sheet in a room reeking of gasoline.
It was not a confession, an informant’s tip or eyewitness accounts that led to McCann’s quick arrest on arson charges. It was the trove of incriminating evidence on the troubled ex-Marine’s cellphone.
Related: Cellphone firms regularly give data to law enforcement
And you thought only the NSA was collecting the content of your calls!
It pinpointed his location near the house when the fire began. It stored text messages saying he was about to make a large sum of money, that he was about to do something he didn’t want discovered, that he hoped there would be no proof.
Then why, after Snowden, did he text and leave a trail?
That quick police work, however, has left police, prosecutors and a Norfolk County grand jury with a low-tech riddle: Why — and perhaps for whom — did McCann allegedly set the house afire? Could it have been the random act of a man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder? Or was it somehow related to a seven-year legal battle between the three developers and Spooner Road residents that soured everyone involved?
Well, WHERE DID THE TEXTS GO?
Where was the phone located in the months leading up to all this?
On Spooner Road, the swiftness with which the neighborhood eyesore went up in flames did not come as a shock to some.
$ure $mells like in$urance fraud to me.
“Everyone was kind of jokingly saying, “Is someone going to burn it down?’ ” said Philip D. Kousoubris, who purchased a home on the street two years ago. “But to actually go through with that in a nice neighborhood in a suburb of Boston that’s historic is kind of hard to believe.”
According to extensive police reports obtained by the Globe, Brookline Police investigators believe McCann was “receiving a large payment’’ for torching the house.
Related: Virginia Still a Hot Topic With Globe
That was a one day wonder, and I think my theory holds water (pun intended).
The police also noted that there was an $800,000 insurance policy on the house, but McCann’s lawyer has said his client has no connection to the three developers, and the Globe’s examination of public databases contains no hint that McCann knew any of the three men.
Then what, the guy was on prescription pharmaceuticals because of service in the military?
**************
The mystery has yet another supporting player: Jody Pattison, who has a Brookline real estate agency and insists he had only been trying to help an ex-Marine with mental health problems.
As a crime scene, Spooner Road is miscast. Its spacious homes have housed the affluent for more than a century.
Now I see the shock and special Sunday treatment.
The road is now part of a historic district and many of its homes sell for $2 million or more. Police are called rarely, and even then the calls are likely to be for home alarms triggered by accident or complaints about telephone scammers.
That all changed on a rainy Friday in July....
--more--"
And like so many Sunday Globe Specials, this one day wonder will recede down the memory hole.
