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By ROBERT TANNER AP National Writer or EAST STROUDSBURG, Pa. The firefighters could see the blaze flickering over the hill before they even reached the church camp. By the time they got to the fire room cabin, it was already too late. Ji Yun Lee lay curled in a ball on the floor. Flames roared over and around her. Her father, Han Tak Lee, sat silent, barefoot on the grass outside. The night sky above him glowed orange as electrical arcs sizzled and popped. Investigators quickly sifted through the sooty ashes, the charred walls and floor, the melted roof and the buckled pipes and came up with an explanation: arson — and murder. Lee, they said, had killed his daughter. The clues were everywhere. From patterns on the cabin’s floor to collapsed springs on the furni ture, most of the lessons taught to budding fire investigators turned up in the cabin. The local experts — the county fire marshal, a state hired fire analyst, a chemist spoke without hesitation that the evidence proved arson. No one questioned their conclu sion. Not the jury — not even the defense attorney disputed that the blaze was intentionally touched off with a flammable fluid. It was a textbook case, and Lee was dealt a guilty verdict and a life sentence. Except the textbooks were wrong. Within a few years of Lee’s convic tion, scientific studies smashed decades of earlier, widely accepted beliefs about how fires work and the telltale trail they leave behind. Today, fire investigators are taught that the clues relied upon in the 1989 investigation of the cabin fire don’t prove anything more than an accident. And some of the leading U.S. experts on arson say that Lee — an immigrant who worked six days a week to bring his wife and daugh ters from South Korea to America - was the victim of a horrible tragedy, not a criminal. There could be hundreds more like him, people wrongfully convicted of arson, these experts say. Pennsylvania courts have repeat edly rejected the argument that the prosecution’s case was built on bad science. A definitive count isn’t possible, but the best estimate of leading fire investigators across the country is that there could be hundreds of mistaken arson prosecutions, all built on the same ideas that were uprooted more than a decade ago. The new arson science could become the most powerful tool to reveal wrongful convictions since DNA testing began overturning rape and murder cases in 1989. So far, 186 men and one woman have been freed because of the new technology. This isn’t just about correcting the historical record. Not only are people behind bars because of faulty arson investigative tech niques, others may be on their way. Critics say that some investigators, in rural counties and big cities, resist the new science and pros ecute cases based on discredited methods. “How do you know someone's guilty if you don’t know a crime has been committed?” says Richard Custer, principal architect of a piv otal document on arson. Another investigator — John J. Lentini, a widely known fire expert who has worked with national arson investigation groups to unravel the old misconceptions — has been a consultant on Lee's case. His conclusion: “While the Com monwealth’s witnesses may have believed that they were testifying truthfully, the fact is that the jury was misled by objectively false tes timony.” New line of thinking Up until the 1990s, this is what fire investigators were taught: __ Fires always burn up, not down. — Fires that burn very fast are fueled by accelerants; “normal” fires burn slowly. — Arsons fueled by accelerants burn hotter than “normal” fires. — The clues to arson are clear. Burn holes on the floor indicate multiple points of origin. Finely cracked glass proves a hotter than normal fire. So does the collapse of the springs in bedding or furniture, and the appearance of large blisters on charred wood, known as “alliga toring.” Firefighters and __ investiga tors arrived at these conclusions through decades of observation. But those beliefs had never been given close scientific scrutiny, until an effort that began in the 1970s and continued through the 1980s. “There were a lot of rules of thumb, but very little scientific understanding,” said Jonathan Barnett, a professor of fire protec tion engineering at Worcester Poly technic Institute. _ Once researchers began to apply the scientific method to beliefs about fire, they fell apart. A major revelation came from greater understanding of a phe nomenon known as “flashover” When a fire burns inside a structure, it sends heat and gases to the ceiling until it reaches a certain tempera ture — and then in a critical tran sition, everything combustible in that space will catch fire. Instead of a fire in a room, now there is a room on fire. When that happens, it can leave any number of signs that investiga tors earlier thought meant arson like the burn holes on the floor that used to prove multiple starting points. And it can cause a fire to burn down from the ceiling — not up as investigators had been taught. Significantly, flashover can create very hot and very fast-moving fires. And it can occur within just a few minutes, dashing the concept that only arson fires fueled by acceler ants can quickly rage out of control. And the crazed glass? It comes from water being sprayed on hot glass, not a hot fire. The studies began to chip away at the old beliefs but it took years. Through the 1980s, texts at the National Fire Academy in Emmits burg, Md., still taught the traditional techniques. It wasn’t until 1992, when a guide to fire investigations by the National Fire Protection Association clearly laid out, in a document relied upon by authorities nationwide, that the earlier beliefs were wrong. “It’s not that they’re bad inves tigators or there’s been any con spiracy to promulgate erroneous conclusions — it’s just the way it was,” says Custer of the 1992 guide. “How many years did we think the Earth was flat?”
Newspaper Details
Sandusky Register
Sandusky, Ohio, US
Sun, Dec 10, 2006
Page 29
Full Page
Clipped by
Jonathan B.
AU 19 Jun 2026
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