Open phone line leads to arson arrests

PALMER — Whether it was due to a phenomenon known colloquially as butt-dialing is unclear, but Alaska State Troopers say an open line between an accused arsonist’s cell phone and 911 dispatchers led to an arrest Sunday.

According to an affidavit Trooper Dug Cook filed in court, emergency dispatchers received the call at 2:06 a.m., Sunday. Judging by the trooper’s affidavit, the caller didn’t speak directly with dispatchers, but dispatchers could hear voices over the open line.

“Male voices were heard talking about breaking into a building and setting fire to the structure,” Cook wrote.

The phone was a TracFone, meaning it wasn’t registered to a particular individual. But Palmer police were able to determine the open-line call was placed when the phone was at a home on Gold Bullion Blvd.

Troopers drove to the area, arriving 20 minutes after the call was placed to find a home up the street from where the call was placed “partially engulfed in flames,” Cook wrote.

Fire officials say that crews were on scene in short order and were able to save the home from total destruction. But one firefighter injured his thumb while crews worked to pull plywood off the boarded up windows.

Cook said that after dispatchers listened to the TracFone’s voicemail he was able to find an address for its owner, Merl Badger Jr., 21, and eventually tracked him down at a home in Palmer.

Badger talked to Cook and told him he and a friend, Christopher Hartman, 21, were at a house on Gold Bullion earlier that evening and took a walk to check out the house that burned, which Badger described as an “old abandoned meth house.”

Firefighters have previously described the building as a trailer home with multiple additions built over time that had been boarded up and unoccupied for quite some time. Cook said that a check of borough property records show the structure was worth $8,900 before the blaze and the property it’s on is valued at $31,400.

“Once at the residence they located a can of lighter fluid in the snowbank behind the residence. Badger Jr. squirted the base of the house and a mattress which was inside an unfinished addition with the lighter fluid and lit the house on fire with a Bic lighter,” Cook wrote.

With the house burning, the two men went back to their friend’s house, “where they proceeded to tell three persons at the scene about setting the fire,” Cook wrote.

For his part, Hartman refused to tell the trooper much of anything, saying he didn’t remember going to the house and didn’t even remember when he started drinking.

“However, he was able to recall the ‘drinking games’ he and Badger Jr. had participated in,” Cook wrote.

Court records show that Palmer Magistrate Craig Condie has approved releasing Hartman to the custody of his mother and Badger to his father. The magistrate reduced bail for the two men to $10,000. Jail records Thursday afternoon showed both have since been released from jail.

The website Urban Dictionary defines butt-dialing as “when you accidentally sit on your cell phone and dial someone up and don’t realize it.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.