EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Investigators believe a fire that destroyed a chapel owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was set deliberately.
The building was leveled in the June 30 blaze. Church officials say the building and its contents were worth more than $5 million. The church didn't have a fire alarm, firefighters say.
Police have no suspects, but East Lansing fire investigators say they have several clues that the fire was arson.
A hole was punched through a glass window on one of the doors, and a trained dog detected accelerants near the origin of the fire. The fire also was unusually hot and spread quickly.
"It's like a big jigsaw puzzle," Fire Marshal Bob Pratt told the Lansing State Journal for a Friday story. "Once we had all of the pieces, we knew what it was."
Police have no motive, and the church received no threats before the fire. An arsonist struck the same church in 1990, but Pratt said there was no evidence linking this fire to that one. 'We're not ruling anyone or anything out," police Capt. Juli Liebler said.
Meanwhile, the church's 800 members say they're planning to rebuild on the same site. An official from the church's headquarters in Salt Lake City will be in East Lansing next week to discuss plans for the new church, which could be completed by next summer.
"There's hatred and intolerance in the world, but we're not focusing on that," said Bruce Dale, who leads the Lansing stake, an association of 11 Mormon churches in the area. "We're just grateful for all the support we've received from this community."
The church served as a stake center for the 3,300 members in the area. Its library housed genealogical records.
Cheryl Haddock, public affairs director for the Lansing stake, said several local churches have offered their facilities and many outsiders have made donations to the church. She said members take solace in the fact that no one was injured and that several items were salvaged, including a backpack full of family records. The fire wasn't the only one to damage a Mormon church in the last year. On Sept. 10, an arsonist caused $200,000 in damage to a church in Mesa, Ariz. That church also had been damaged by an arsonist in 1993. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has investigated 1,120 church bombings nationwide in the last seven years. At least 25 of those fires were in Michigan, the State Journal reported.