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Police say racial fight led to Indiana fire
Louisville teen charged with arson, murder
By ERIC WESLANDER, The Courier-Journal
A police affidavit claims Shawn Bald said, 'You have to go to sleep sometime, and you will all burn.' A fight with racial overtones will be a central factor in the murder case against a Louisville teen-ager accused of setting a fatal fire last September in Jeffersonville, Ind., authorities said yesterday.
Shawn L. Bald, 17, was charged Tuesday with starting the fire, which killed a couple and their 4-month-old son on Colonial Park Drive.
Police and prosecutors said the fire was set in retaliation for a fight two weeks earlier involving Bald, who is black, and a white family who lived in the building that burned.
According to a police affidavit, Bald described the fire afterward as a 'marshmallow roast' because the people who lived in the building were all white.
Prosecutors plan to use accounts of the fight to establish a motive for the fire, since the people with whom Bald fought lived in the building. The three fire victims were not involved in the altercation.
The case underscores what some authorities said yesterday was a considerable amount of racial tension all summer between some white working-class residents of the area and a group of young black males who hung out on the block.
The fight occurred on Aug. 28. James and Karen Moore, whom authorities believe were the intended victims of the fire, told police that they saw Bald in the area of their Colonial Park Drive apartment building that day and asked him to leave.
Eventually, Bald struck James Moore with a metal baseball bat, and James Moore struck back using a metal chair, according to the police report.
All three were injured and, according to the affidavit, Bald reportedly said afterward, 'You have to go to sleep sometime, and you will all burn.'
Two weeks later, on Sept. 11, the building at 819 Colonial Park Drive, containing four apartments, caught fire. A fire marshal later ruled that an accelerant had been poured up and down the stairway inside the building and that the fire started in front of the Moores' apartment.
The Moores escaped, along with several other people. But three people were killed: Allen Rumpel, 40; his girlfriend, Jennifer Steinberger, 24; and their 4-month-old son, Henry Allen Rumpel Jr.
Police arrested Bald Tuesday at the Greenwood Apartments in Jeffersonville, and they said other arrests are possible.
Bald, of the 700 block of S. Clay St. in Louisville, is charged with three counts of felony murder, four counts of arson, and two counts of attempted murder because James and Karen Moore were in the building at the time of the fire. He will be arraigned today in Clark Superior Court.
Jeffersonville police detectives received information from friends who had talked to Bald after the fire, from neighbors who saw him nearby at the time of the fire and from an anonymous tip hotline.
According to police, Bald has said he had no involvement with the fire. His attorney, Dwight Cosby, did not return a phone call yesterday.
Clark County deputy prosecutor Tom Lowe said the fight would be a crucial element.
'Without it, I don't think a jury will understand what his motivation was,'Lowe said. 'Without that it just looks like a random act.'
Conflict in the neighborhood began to escalate last summer when Haven House, an agency that offers transitional housing for the homeless, bought five empty buildings on the block and renovated them for use by its clients.
The building that burned did not belong to Haven House, though the three victims had been its clients.
One of the effects of the move was the organization of a neighborhood watch, of which James Moore was a co-captain. Anderson, the director of Haven House, said that partly explains the tension between the Moore family and the young people in the neighborhood.
Anderson also said many of the residents of the building had verbally confronted the teen-agers, most of them black males, who liked to hang out in Colonial Park Drive and in front of houses there. The confrontations became more frequent and more intense as the summer dragged on, she said.
'There was racial tension,' Anderson said. 'That only became part of it when they got angry at each other. It was territory, it was turf.'
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