Arson Suspect's Low-Key Life

Neighbors Characterize Southeast Man as 'Average, Everyday Guy'

He drove his sister's 10-year-old Ford Escort. He religiously mowed the tiny lawn outside his home. He was a 50-year-old fast-food restaurant manager at a busy, faceless intersection in Northeast Washington.

He ordered meatloaf to go at a church cafeteria.

And he committed his crimes, investigators said, using plastic shopping bags, containers for spring water and soft drinks, as well as articles of clothing as mundane as a sock.

Thomas A. Sweatt, who investigators believe is responsible for dozens of arsons in the Washington area, seemed to live an utterly commonplace life that was spent between his job and the plain brick apartment building he shared with his sister.

But when he strayed from the route between Apartment 3, in the 500 block of Lebaum Street SE, and the Kentucky Fried Chicken/Pizza Hut restaurant at the hectic intersection of New York Avenue and Bladensburg Road NE, Sweatt allegedly became the most elusive and daring local arsonist in recent memory.

For two years prior to his arrest yesterday, investigators believe, he terrorized sleeping neighborhoods in Northeast and Southeast, as well as suburban Maryland and Virginia, starting fires early in the morning on porches and stairwells.

At a federal hearing yesterday in Greenbelt, Sweatt -- charged with 11 federal offenses stemming from four fires and an attempted arson -- shuffled into the courtroom in black sneakers, slacks and a blue dress shirt. A lanky man with brown hair and a thin mustache, he looked relaxed and sat with his hands in his lap, his legs extended and his ankles crossed. He answered a judge's series of questions with a simple, "Yes, sir."

On his small street, a block from St. Elizabeths Hospital, neighbors sat on their steps, wondering about the quiet man who lived in the first-floor apartment across the hall from his sister. She would clip the hedge outside, and he would mow the lawn Tuesday nights, they said. The neighbors recalled little else. "He seemed like a gentleman," one said.

"He was not a person who was out in the neighborhood," next-door neighbor Sharon Seawright, 48, said. "An average, everyday guy."

Michelle Green, 36, who lived across the street, recalled that Sweatt and his sister, Patricia, often dined on weekends in the cafeteria of a United House of Prayer church, where Green volunteered in the cafeteria. "His favorite food was meatloaf," said Green, adding that he always got it to go.

At the restaurant where authorities said Sweatt was a manager, a few people in the frenetic neighborhood of motels, a strip club and gas stations recalled him.

Venus Johnson, 38, who lives in a nearby motel, remembered a recent kindness.