26-year-old Darren Beach Jr, of Phoenix, AZ, was charged with one count of arson of an occupied structure after he was caught setting fired to an LGBTQ youth center where he once received services.
via NYDN:
Surveillance footage shows Beach enter the facility, called one.n.ten, and douse the building with gasoline before setting it on fire July 12.
“Our youth whom we serve have been worried. Some are shaken,” the organization said in a release.
“Obviously this young man has issues and needs help,” the release said, noting that the man stopped receiving services when he aged out of the program at 25.
“We had no warning signals from him throughout his time with us. There was nothing to let on that he had anything against our organization.”
Ray Bradford, a former volunteer who had worked with Beach, said he had a “good heart,” KPHO-TV reported.
“He had a sense of right and wrong. He wanted people to be right with each other,”Bradford said.
“If he could get the counseling, the medications and food, the shelter — just get the basic things he needs, it would have changed him radically and this incident never would have happened,” he added.
The center reports it lost everything when it was torched according to KPHO-TV.
But the community has rallied to support the center in the wake of its loss.
“It’s really been incredible,” Nate Rhoton, the center’s director of finance and operations told KPHO-TV. “To experience that sort of love and acceptance from the community makes it just a little bit easier to swallow what’s happened to us — to this safe space for our youth and make it a little bit easier for them to move on.”
This definitely sounds like terrorism to us. Darren Beach Jr. is a terrorist.
