Community cleans up firebombed parsonage
Community cleans up Chester parsonage hit by firebomb
Around 10 p.m. one night, someone threw a firebomb into the parsonage of the Range Memorial Church of God in Christ. On Sunday, church members and a team from MVP Recovery were picking up the pieces.
A couple days later, the church’s bus was vandalized.
“So somebody is trying to sabotage churches in the area,” the Rev. Kendon Gibson, executive pastor of Range Memorial, said. “They just burned that church down on Ninth Street. Is this a link? Who would want to burn up a church? You got more than just us, you’ve got God to think about with that one.”
Capt. James Chubb of the Chester Police Department said investigators believe that the Third Presbyterian Church fire last month may have been set by a squatter, although no ruling has yet been made.
Chubb acknowledged that there have been a few church fires throughout the city in the past two to three weeks and said that the city, county and state arson investigators were all working together in reference to see if they are related.
On Sunday, the Rev. Thurston Jones, pastor of St. Paul’s Church of Christ in God and superintendent of the district that includes Range Memorial, also spoke of what happened June 1.
“It was at night, somebody came up, got out of their car, tossed a Molotov cocktail or something inside this window and it started a little fire inside,” he said.
Gibson added, “The cops chased the person but they were unsuccessful. They chased them all the way to 95.”
He said the perpetrators were last seen traveling south on I-95 in a white truck.
“When we got here, of course, there was water damage, fire damage,” Gibson said. “As a result of the fire, (the firefighters) did have to knock out a lot of doors and some of our windows. The fire company does a little more damage because they have to make sure that everything is out ... They had to make sure that the fire was out, so they doused it before they left to make sure there were no hot spots.”
The bomb landed in what was the living room of the parsonage. Black char marks remained on the ceiling and wall.
Gibson explained that no one had lived in the house for six to seven years but the 50 to 75-member congregation had been working to make it a facility for community outreach.
The fire wasn’t their only incident.
“Two days later, they vandalized our bus,” Gibson said. “They bust our windows out, they pulled our wires from under the bottom of the vehicle.”
On Sunday, members of the church community and a fourperson team from MVP Recovery were working to clean the parsonage area up.
“We heard that this local church was firebombed,” Nicholas Lebotesis, who was leading the MVP Recovery team, said. “MVP wanted to reach out a helping hand to let them know that they’re not by themselves, just to let them know that there are rays of light in Chester.”
He said he and his team of Adrian Galyez, Dimitri Horvat and Thomas Te, were working to clear an area out for a picnic area for church members and a play area for their children. Gibson said his hope is that once the area is cleared, the church can install security cameras.
Lebotesis credited MVP for helping out as community service is an integral part of its own program.
“We want to let people know that love still reigns and that there’s more good in the world than not,” he said.
Gibson agreed, as even in this moment, his sermon “was a message of hope, to bring hope not just to our community but around the world. To really reach the hearts, the minds and the spirits of the people and let them know that we need to start displaying a lot of love because it’s a lot of hate that’s being displayed right now. The issue is not destroying buildings, it’s a heart issue. We’ve got to fix broken hearts right now.”