Md. Community Rises, Arson Seared Into Its Consciousness

The married couple stood in their front yard in Charles County, arranging the concrete blocks for a new patio, the eventual home for their pink azaleas and ruby red geraniums. Under a Saturday sun, the husband hoisted the blocks while the wife smiled, laughed and said this is going to be a beautiful neighborhood soon.

She misses her rose bushes from the old house in Clinton, but the neighbors here are just so friendly, and oh, yeah, by the way, she's armed.

"We're packing," Evora Swoopes said.

"We took a civilian firearms course," said her husband, Leonard.

Before the arson fires that raged through this Southern Maryland neighborhood six months ago -- a mysterious conflagration that first raised fears of eco-terrorism and then of racial attacks -- the Swoopeses didn't know how to handle a 9mm Glock. They didn't know how to store it and load it, hold it and shoot it. They know now.

"I feel a lot safer," Evora Swoopes said, getting serious. "I feel better prepared."

On Dec. 6, the fires destroyed 12 largely unoccupied Colonial-style houses in the Hunters Brooke development and damaged 15 others. One man, Jeremy D. Parady, has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit arson; four others face trial. Parady has said he targeted the houses because many were bought by African Americans. But prosecutors say there could have been more than one motive, including a desire to draw attention to a car club. The men, all white and in their early twenties, have not been charged with hate crimes.

Little physical evidence remains from the fires. Behind a few houses on Cabinwood Court, the scene of the worst damage, the trunks of oak trees are still charred black. At the entrance to the neighborhood, a sign warns of 24-hour video surveillance, and another declares: "This is a fire damaged dangerous area. Structures damaged by fire may fail."

No buyer chose to cancel a purchase contract after the arson, and the demand for houses in Hunters Brooke has not slackened. On the day of the fires, 22 houses were occupied. By last month, 50 families had moved in, and 86 houses were under construction. But no one had moved into the houses burned so badly that they had to be razed and rebuilt. Seventeen families, some in apartments or crowding in with relatives, wait in frustration to begin their new lives in the neighborhood.

Marshall Ames, vice president of Miami-based Lennar Corp., the parent company of developers Patriot Homes and U.S. Homes, said the last of those families will move in by August.

Most days, the muddy streets in Hunters Brooke are tight with pickups and contractor's vans. It sounds like a neighborhood on the mend: Sprinklers skitch-skitch on freshly laid sod; the pneumatic thud of a nail gun can be heard from the rooftops.

On a lawn that is still only mud, Kendall Walker, a manager at PNC Bank in Prince George's County, was planting begonias around a maple sapling, while his 5-year-old daughter, Kendallee, swung from the sticks that held the tree aloft.