A 15-year-old boy has been arrested after allegedly setting fire to his family’s home in Gorham.
The two-alarm fire at 61 Valley View Drive caused extensive damage to the house, but the five residents escaped without injury.
Fire Chief Robert Lefebvre and Police Chief Chris Sanborn said they have no reason to believe that Tuesday’s fire was related to a string of five suspicious fires that occurred over a period of two weeks in 2012. Those fires damaged unoccupied properties in the same area of northwest Gorham.
“There is no relationship to the 2012 fires,” Sgt. Joel Davis of the state Fire Marshal’s Office said Tuesday night.
Lefebvre said Valley View Drive is an upscale subdivision off Route 114. According to the town’s tax records, the home that burned is appraised at $435,000.
Investigators from the Fire Marshal’s Office were still at the scene late Tuesday, sifting through debris in an effort to determine how and where the blaze started.
When firefighters and police arrived, around 4:30 p.m., the front of the 1½-story house was engulfed in flames and its occupants were standing outside, Lefebvre said.
Lefebvre confirmed that the 15-year-old boy lives in the home but he and Sanborn would not go into details about why the boy might have started the fire.
Sanborn said the boy, who is not being named because he is a juvenile, was arrested at the scene and taken to the Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland, where he was being held Tuesday night. Sanborn said the teenager did not resist arrest.
The police chief said he was “very aware” of the suspicious fires in the same part of Gorham in March and April of 2012.
Sanborn said no one has been charged with setting those fires, which damaged a home on Spiller Road, a snowmobile clubhouse on Mighty Street, a single-family home on Great Falls Road that was being renovated, a garage on Buck Street and a building on Dingley Spring Road.
The fires were set from March 27 to April 11.
After those fires, investigators with the Fire Marshal’s Office, Gorham police and firefighters canvassed neighborhoods and distributed fliers about what to look for and how to contact authorities.
“At this time we are considering those fires unrelated to this one,” Sanborn said late Tuesday.
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