Indiana Man Admits Setting Church Fire in Dana Point

A 1995 fire that destroyed the Sunday school building of South Shore American Baptist Church in Dana Point was deliberately set by a man who called himself a missionary of Lucifer, federal authorities said Tuesday.

Jay Scott Ballinger, 38, of Yorktown, Ind., pleaded guilty in federal court in Indianapolis on Tuesday to setting the Dana Point and 25 other church fires across the nation during a five-year spree that ended last year.

The arsonist “frequently expressed his hostility toward organized Christianity, signed individuals he met to contracts with the devil and termed himself a missionary of Lucifer,” according to a press release issued by the Justice Department after Ballinger’s plea.

The plea followed a nationwide investigation by the FBI, the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Indiana State Fire Marshal’s Office, state and local fire investigators and the National Church Arson Task Force. The case “represents the largest number of fires charged to any single defendant” since President Clinton formed the task force in 1996, said James Johnson, Treasury’s undersecretary for enforcement and the task force’s co-chair.

In addition to the Dana Point fire, Ballinger pleaded guilty to setting fires at churches in Alabama, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina and Tennessee. Most of them were started late at night or early in the morning at isolated rural churches where Ballinger would break a window at the side or back of the church, pour gasoline into the building and set it afire with a lighter, Justice Dept. officials said.

In Dana Point, firefighters were summoned to the church in the 32700 block of Crown Valley Parkway about 1:30 a.m. Sept. 25, 1995, by a neighbor who heard dogs barking and awakened to see flames leaping 30 feet high.

Investigators later determined that the blaze had been started in a large plastic bin filled with clothes to be donated to the homeless. It took 40 firefighters about 50 minutes to control the fire, which charred the church’s Sunday school classrooms, offices and a kitchen, causing an estimated $300,000 in damage.

Congregants later held worship services in a trailer. “This has been devastating,” one of them said at the time. “It’s like it was happening in your own family.”

On Tuesday, the court recommended that Ballinger be sentenced to more than 42 years for his crimes.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.