Had these been posted yet? I don't remember seeing them. Those are the mugshots of Moseley, DeBusk, Cloyd, LtoR
Posted on 03/08/2006 6:54:36 AM PST by commish
NO story yet, just a blurb on website and TV.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Well, we should've guessed it. "Hold the presses!" Which church do you think at least ONE of the trio is a member of? Not only that, but was an active, fully involved member, growing up.
Yup, Baptist.
~~~~~
http://www.wsfa.com/Global/story.asp?S=4612344&nav=0RdE
Friend of Arson Suspect Speaks Out
March 9, 2006, 11:03 PM CST
There's new information about one of the three young men charged in the Alabama church arsons.
20-year old Matt Cloyd was the last suspect charged.
Authorities believe he drove his Toyota 4-Runner to at least six of the nine fires.
A close friend described Cloyd as "smart, making all A's" and "a good guy who did something dumb."
Ryan Sheffield says his friend was adventurous and liked attention. "He was a thrill-seeker. He would build ramps in his back yard. He would do anything for a thrill and he would do anything for a laugh."
Sheffield says he and Cloyd have been friends since they were nine or ten and were regulars at First Baptist Church in Pelham.
All three men, Benjamin Moseley, Russell DeBusk and Matthew Cloyd are due in federal court Friday in Birmingham at 3:00 PM. They're being housed in the Shelby County Jail.
~~~~~~~
http://www.nbc13.com/news/7861224/detail.html
Friends, Family Of Suspects Ponder Motive Behind Church Fires
POSTED: 6:39 pm CST March 9, 2006
UPDATED: 7:32 pm CST March 9, 2006
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- One of the three men accused of being part of a string of arsons that targeted Baptist churches in Alabama was very involved in the Baptist church when he was growing up.
Mathewe Lee Cloyd attended First Baptist Church of Pelham, where he played basketball and was baptized.
His friends said they're confused and disappointed that he is now a suspect.
"I hate what Matthew did. It was dumb and he wasn't thinking, but I love who he is and I love him as a person," Ryan Sheffield, one of Cloyd's friends, said.
Friends and neighbors are also talking about possible motives.
"He was always excited about going to church, so I don't think he hated God or hated churches or anything like that. I just think it was something he did and he's going to have to pay for it," Sheffield said.
Cloyd is like the other suspects in this case, Ben Moseley and Russell Debusk.
All three are outgoing, popular, star students from upscale homes and good schools.
Mosely was high school homecoming king, an honors student and a class favorite from the Trussville area.
Debusk was a drama and debate student from Hoover.
His family had no comment, but neighbors said he was helpful, polite and got along well with others.
"It is disappointing to think somebody had to do something this bad," Lind Gibb, one of Dubusk's neighbors, said.
Friends and neighbors are waiting like everyone else for more answers to why this happened.
Attorney Brett Bloomston describes his client, Dubusk, as somber and remorseful.
Tommy Spina, who represents Matthew Cloyd, said the media will be disappointed to learn the chruch burnings were not racially, satanically or religiously motivated.
"What I don't want to see happen is the national attention in the media put any more pressure on authorities to convict or obtain certain results," Bloomston said.
All three suspects are in the Shelby County Jail, isolated from the general population.
Friday afteronoon, the three men will have a detention hearing. Their attorneys are hopeful they'll get their clients out of jail on bond.
Here's a little more about DeBusk's satanic "religion." He *wasn't* Baptist, not even Christian, in his upbringing, according to his suitemate.
They just did "strange little hippie rituals in the woods," lol -- and the intrigue in the occult only lasted "a month or so." (Then they went underground, apparently.)
~~~~~
Neighbors Are at a Loss Over Students' Arson Arrest
'This is so out of the bounds of what we deal with here,' says one Alabama professor.
By Richard Fausset, Times Staff Writer
March 10, 2006
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.— "BSC theater students Russ DeBusk and Ben Moseley are on the road to stardom," said the story in the campus newspaper at Birmingham-Southern College.
A few days ago, many students here would have said that was a fair prediction. The two sophomores were creative, popular products of Birmingham's comfortable suburbs. Benjamin Nathan Moseley, the son of a Jefferson County constable, sang baritone in the college choir. Russell DeBusk Jr. had been chosen to star in a local director's feature film, with Moseley playing his comic foil.
They were being molded by one of Alabama's most prestigious private schools — a Methodist-affiliated college where 70% of students take part in organized volunteer work.
Yet when the biweekly paper hit the racks this week, DeBusk and Moseley — both 19 — were in federal custody, charged in a string of church fires in poorer, rural communities to the south and west of here.
A third man, Matthew Lee Cloyd, 20, also was arrested and charged in connection with the fires. Cloyd, a student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is the son of a doctor and was an honor student in high school.
In the suburbs of Birmingham this week, people were perplexed. "They were smart kids, middle class," said Lane Graham, 57, a resident of DeBusk's hometown, Hoover. "You don't know if it's stuff they read, stuff they learned in school or what."
"These kids were not some huckleberries from the South," said Renee Sakaguchi, a parent in Indian Springs Village, a tony suburb of rolling hills and horse farms where Cloyd grew up. "I'm going to have my sons read the [newspaper] articles and say: 'Look at what these boys had in front of them — and now look at what they have to look forward to.' "
Birmingham is a city with pockets of wealth nourished by the old steel and iron industries and, more recently, healthcare and banking.
All three suspects in the church fires grew up in neighborhoods with median household incomes of more than $50,000. In Sumter County, where the students allegedly burned Galilee Baptist Church, the median household income is $18,911. Nearly 40% of Sumter County residents live below the poverty line.
The charges seemed particularly difficult to swallow at Birmingham-Southern. The small campus attracts the children of Alabama's elite. Its students are proud of their commitment to public service. They tutor in inner-city Birmingham, work in San Francisco homeless shelters and volunteer in Mozambique.
Some on campus sought Thursday to distance themselves from the arrests. A few dozen students had signed a resolution posted in the cafeteria and passed by the student government the night before. It stated that the crimes did not represent the school's principles of "positive community and civic engagement, honorable morals and global human dignity."
Others looked for words to describe their feelings about the suspects, young men they knew as friends or valued students and could still speak of warmly.
"I am overwhelmed by the immense immaturity of it," said Lester Seigel, the choir director and chairman of Birmingham-Southern's fine arts department. "There is a moral disconnect — this is so out of the bounds of what we deal with here."
Federal authorities allege that Moseley, DeBusk and Cloyd burned five churches in central Alabama during a night of hunting that started Feb. 2.
Moseley and Cloyd burned four more churches a few days later to throw investigators off their trail, according to an affidavit filed by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The document quotes Cloyd as telling a witness that the fires started as "a joke and it got out of hand."
DeBusk and Moseley were campus clowns, to some extent, but entertaining was something they took seriously. According to the student paper, they were thinking about moving to Los Angeles together to pursue careers in film. They spent much of 2005 honing their dramatic skills in campus plays, eventually attracting the attention of Brian Wilson, 25, an aspiring director who cast them in his movie "Work," a romantic comedy.
He said DeBusk and Moseley showed up in the audition in matching baseball shirts and pitched themselves as a team. He liked their rapport and their timing. He also liked their professionalism: The next day they showed up at his house in suits, with head shots and resumes in hand.
The small crew shot many of their scenes while the newspapers were full of stories about the church fires. Wilson said his director of photography brought the issue up one day but DeBusk and Moseley seemed uninterested.
"They were just like, 'Oh, that's crazy, whatever,' " he said.
Birmingham-Southern students recalled Thursday how Cloyd came around from time to time to hang out. He was a former Birmingham-Southern student and member of the Sigma Chi fraternity who had met DeBusk and Moseley in the dorms, students said. But he had transferred to the University of Alabama at the start of the current school year, where he was in the pre-med program.
Ian Cunningham, DeBusk's suitemate, said Cloyd could be bothersome. "He mocked everybody; he had no tact. It seemed like he didn't have a lot of selfesteem."
Something else disturbed Cunningham: DeBusk had come back from summer break talking about Satanism, and he had gotten Moseley interested as well. To DeBusk, Satanism was not a violent religion, but a peaceful means of self-actualization, Cunningham said. DeBusk had always kidded his churchgoing friends about their faith in Christianity, but Cunningham said it was a gentle sarcasm, not a bitter one.
He recalled DeBusk and Moseley having some strange weekends. "They'd show up at 7 in the morning covered in pine needles," he recalls. "They'd just have strange little hippie rituals in the woods."
The infatuation with the occult seemed to last about a month, Cunningham said. After September, he didn't hear either of them speak about it.
Wilson said he hadn't finished shooting his movie when his stars were arrested. On Thursday, he was trying to figure out what to do next — maybe recast and re-shoot, maybe sell some of the footage of the suspects to TV news stations.
On the Birmingham-Southern campus, students were still carrying around the campus paper with the story about DeBusk and Moseley. The last paragraphs discuss DeBusk's plan to one day write, direct and star in his own film.
Moseley said his friend "has the potential to do everything he wants to do."
------
[Excerpt]
Ian Cunningham, 19, a fellow student, said Moseley "charmed everybody. He was the homecoming king of his high school. He was one of the best actors I've ever seen on the stage. Every play I've seen him in, he blew me away."
"Russ is just a goofy, fun-loving guy, almost like a cartoon character," said Jeremy Burgess, 19, DeBusk's roommate. "He's always nice, respectful and hardworking. He studied more than I did."
A feature article about DeBusk and Moseley in this week's edition of The Hilltop News, the campus newspaper, profiles the students and highlights their acting careers. Moseley, "a huge fan of Johnny Cash," and DeBusk, whose "real dream is to become a screenwriter and director," had appeared together in at least three plays and a documentary, the story said.
The article ends: "This could be said of both DeBusk and Moseley. After they are finished here at BSC, they may truly be on the road to stardom."
Burgess said DeBusk told him last summer that he had found a new religious interest.
"He wasn't raised as a Christian, and he had never found any kind of religion to settle down with," Burgess said. "He thought he'd found something that worked for him. It's not worshipping the devil. It's nothing ritualistic. It's about the pursuit of knowledge. He explained to me that there can be Satanic Christians. It gave him the peacefulness and serenity of Buddhism. It was a real peaceful thing."
Burgess said DeBusk invited him on a "demon-hunting" trip last summer.
"Nothing happened," Burgess said. "Some friends of ours and the two of us were in the middle of the woods, playing guitar. They had some beer. There were no rituals, no weird séance.
"There was nothing that would lead me to believe he would burn down a church," Burgess said. "Russ was always very respectful of my religion. We discussed it openly, the way many people discuss politics."
Martin Landry, 20, a junior, said he has known Moseley and DeBusk for nearly two years and both were "quite popular. Everybody loved being around them. They were a little wild, a little crazy, but absolutely nothing to suggest the caliber to support what's being reported. They were typical college students. They did like a drink. They enjoyed a good time. But there was no out-of-control aspect to it."
I take back *part* of what I posted about thinking these guys' "deer hunting" excuse was bogus.
Yes, indeedy, they certainly *were* spotlighting while on their arson run. But it wasn't deer they bagged. Gave themselves away, too.
~~~~~
[Bham News excerpts]
http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/1141986427286240.xml&coll=2
Web postings linked to the three - described as All-American college boys - and their friends indicate at least some penchant for partying, for drinking and hunting on the back roads of rural Bibb County.
Cloyd posted this on Moseley's Web page Jan. 9 at www.facebook.com: "To my dearest friend Moseley: The nights have grown long and the interstates of Alabama drunk driverless, the state troopers bored, the county sheriffs less weary, and the deer of Bibb County fearless. 2006 is here, it is time to reconvene the season of evil!"
......
Night hunting:
LeCroy said the trio may face state charges because they admitted to night hunting, which included shooting a cow on Feb. 3. The three could also face additional federal charges.
LeCroy said night hunting near some of the churches started to increase around Christmas.
"It seemed like it shifted into high gear," he said. "It wasn't just one group - there were several groups doing it."
Sometime in late fall, a cow was shot to death. Then, on the night of the first set of fires, a second cow was shot. LeCroy said he had to examine the dead cow but wasn't able to recover a bullet.
Shooting livestock was one of the clues that people from outside the area were involved, Lecroy said. "Most of the old time redneck hunters are just out to get them a deer. They don't usually bother the livestock."
LeCroy said there may be some outlaws among the locals, "but they were brought up not to mess with churches. Their grandma would whip them."
~~~~~~
(I think he meant "whup" but the reporter fixed it.)
I heard on TV that there is a mandatory 5 year sentence for each crime. No parole.
We live in SE part - very close to Grissom. I guess we're neighbors!
Since these Methodist terrorists have been captured and identified as Wesleyan Jihadists, I have not heard one--NOT ONE--Methodist pastor speak out from the pulpit against Methodist Jihad!
Disgraceful!
Well, ya "takes what ya can get" with the ROPL - Religion of Pot Luck.
We'll have to wait until next Wednesday now to see how high they set bail (if any at all) for these guys. This afternoon's hearing was postponed - at the lawyers' request. Hmmm, sounds pretty bad if they'd let the "kids" sit in jail another week.
~~~~
http://www.wsfa.com/Global/story.asp?S=4614432&nav=0RdE
Hearing Postponed for Church Fires Suspects
March 10, 2006, 11:56 AM CST
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- A federal judge postponed a hearing set for Friday to determine whether to grant bond for three college students accused of setting fires that damaged or destroyed nine rural churches in Alabama.
In a brief docket note, U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert R. Armstrong said he was delaying the hearing until 3 p.m. Wednesday at the request of lawyers for Russell Lee DeBusk Jr. and Benjamin Nathan Moseley, both 19, and Matthew Lee Cloyd, 20.
The move meant the three will remain jailed at least until next week on federal charges of conspiracy and burning down a church.
Thanks. It is kind of discouraging, the lack of facts and concern over ten congregations who have been attacked and left homeless.
It hasn't been mentioned in the arrest articles except once, but the financial losses had been originally estimated at $1 million.
I know that's not what you were talking about, but I think that figure (or a true, higher one) should be included prominently every time these "good boys" are being touted and almost excused.
You should have seen the google news list between yesterday and today--every single headline in all the papers carrying one of the AP stories said: ALCOHOL TO BLAME in church fires.
And here I was thinking it was the SUV's fault.
Yes, but they are in the Shelby County jail. It's a cake walk compared to the jail in Birmingham.
Speaking of Huntsville, some of my good friends live there. if you ever need a deck, look them up.
http://www.nicedeck.com/
They attend Madison Baptist.
Had these been posted yet? I don't remember seeing them. Those are the mugshots of Moseley, DeBusk, Cloyd, LtoR
Excellent find. Only the Cloyd man looks half way normal, and from what I hear, he wasn't.
Goes to show you never can tell.
Lots of writers pointed out that they don't look like it's a "joke" now, do they?
Some more new tidbits:
~~~~~~~
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Hard To Believe: Friends, teachers of three charged in fires at nine Alabama churches are stunned by the arrests
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.
Ben. Matt. Russ. Their names match their profiles. All-American college boys from the suburbs with big dreams, promising futures, good parents. Between them there was an occasional speeding ticket, the lust for stardom, an unquenchable thirst for beer, but nothing to indicate that they were up to no good in the deep woods of west Alabama.
Benjamin Moseley and Russell DeBusk, both 19, were top theater students at Birmingham-Southern College. Moseley loved the limelight. DeBusk was his sidekick.
Leaders in local film took note of their quirky talent, and the two landed roles in a film by the University of Alabama at Birmingham called the Youth Violence Project. They hoped that community film would be a springboard to Los Angeles, they told the Birmingham-Southern student newspaper. Eerily, the film appeared Wednesday - the day their faces were broadcast internationally after being arrested in the arson of nine Alabama churches.
Less enthralled with fame and film, Matthew Cloyd, 20, hooked up with the others when he and DeBusk lived in the same dorm.
An academic standout, Cloyd grew up a doctor's son in Shelby County. His true love was deer hunting. But hunting was intertwined with alcohol, and a rebellious anger crept into Cloyd's personality.
After he got a speeding ticket - 85 in a 70 - his Web site musings grew cryptically violent. "Let us defy the very morals of society instilled upon us by our parents, our relatives and of course Jesus," he wrote to Moseley last summer as the two planned a road trip.
About the same time, DeBusk and Moseley started dabbling in the occult. They told friends they were Satanists on a hunt for knowledge, though their friends didn't take it too seriously.
....
At a house listed as DeBusk's home address, a man who came to the door turned reporters away.
Moseley: magnetic and outgoing
The front man for a band and a Johnny Cash fan, Ben Moseley could compose ditties off the top of his head. The leading man in several Birmingham-Southern campus productions, he drew rave reviews, especially from college women who were frequent posters to Moseley's page on the Facebook Web site.
"Just wanted you to know you were fabulously amazing in the play," read a typical post.
The nearly universal response was shock Wednesday when friends learned that Moseley, a 19-year-old Birmingham-Southern student studying theater, had been charged in connection with the church burnings.
Friends at Birmingham-Southern said that Moseley was not studious. He got by. And he had a wild side.
On his page at Facebook, which allows students to post their profiles and communicate with each other, Moseley described his interests as strumming the guitar, "singing, acting, clubbing, dancing, partying, whiskeying." He notes his fondness for 40-ounce beers, and includes the wisdom: "You can always retake a class but you can Never Relive a Party!"
Messages left by friends celebrate the usual college debauchery, but especially intense are those posted by Cloyd, which suggest that the two went out in the woods throughout the fall to drink, hunt deer, drive at high speeds and elude law enforcement.
At Clay-Chalkville High School, where Moseley graduated in 2004, he was homecoming king, student council president his senior year, and voted funniest and the student who contributed the most to the class.
Don Everett Garrett, a theater and language-arts instructor at Paine Intermediate School, was a neighbor of Moseley's for 14 years in Grayson Valley. "I am in total shock. I knew him as a 5-year-old and watched him grow up. He was just a normal kid. As a matter of fact, he's the kind of kid you'd say, "I want my kid to grow up and be like him.'"
Moseley's father, Stephen A. Moseley, is an elected Jefferson County constable and appointed member of the board that oversees the Center Point Fire District. "The parents were very present parents," said Garrett, who said he's only talked with Moseley in passing for the past two years. "Dad was always active with him. They built a treehouse together in the back yard."
At college, Moseley's talents and charms made him a quick success. He played a rapist who has the tables turned on him in a play called Extremities, and he acted with DeBusk in Young Zombies in Love.
"Girls love Ben," said Ian Cunningham. "He's the lady charmer of the school."
In the campus newspaper this week, Moseley is described as being involved in an independent-film project and planning to move to Los Angeles after graduation. He and DeBusk had been shooting footage for a feature-length film they hoped to submit to a local film festival.
Burgess, DeBusk's roommate, said what surprised him most was Moseley doing something and keeping it secret.
"He's not the secret-hiding type," he said.
Cloyd: the scholar
By all accounts, Matthew Lee Cloyd was a scholar - an intelligent person with a bright future in medicine, just like his father. He graduated from Oak Mountain High School in 2003 with honors and several advanced-placement courses under his belt.
At Birmingham-Southern, he pledged the Sigma Chi fraternity and pursued Spanish and pre-med studies. He moved out of his parents' upscale home and into the dorms.
That's where he met DeBusk and Moseley, a friendship that could change all their futures. It was Cloyd's Toyota 4Runner that investigators used to link the three to nine church burnings in west Alabama.
Cloyd needed the SUV for deer hunting, a passion so strong that he lists a hunting guide, Hunting Whitetails by the Moon, as his favorite book on Facebook.
In high school, he was in the National Honor Society, on the algebra team as a freshman, the geometry team as a sophomore and inducted into Mu Alpha Theta math society his junior year. He was involved in the Key Club service organization in ninth grade and was voted Most Outstanding Student in History that same year.
Athletics also were big for Cloyd, who played soccer his freshman year and golf his sophomore year.
He was a member of the high school organization Students Against Destructive Decisions.
By college, soccer was still an interest. But he added on Facebook, "killing innocent animals, running over squirrels with my 4runner" and the misspelled "alcholic libations."
Cloyd spent two years at Birmingham-Southern, then transferred in the fall to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he was a junior. But he remained friends with Moseley and DeBusk.
"Moseley time has betrayed us! It has alotted itself for too much work and not enough libational excursions! Call me mi amor and we shall drink eric robert rudolph back in to hiding!" he wrote on Facebook in September.
News of Cloyd's involvement in the church burnings was shocking to his former high-school classmates.
"He was involved in everything," said Merry Brooke Vaughn, who graduated from high school with Cloyd. "He was always smiling; never mean. He never seemed like he would do anything bad."
----
http://www.nbc13.com/news/7894856/detail.html
Classmates, Professors Of Arson Suspects Want To Help Fire Victims
Chapel Dean Says School Connected To Churches
POSTED: 9:57 pm CST March 10, 2006
UPDATED: 10:14 pm CST March 10, 2006
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Classmates and professors of three suspects in a recent string of church fires now want to help the affected congregations.
Birmingham Southern College students signed a resolution written by those who know the suspects. One paragraph reads, "We support all efforts to rebuild churches and congregations affected by these heinous crimes, but can't fathom cutting our friends off."
Chapel Dean Steward Jackson said prayers began long after the fires hit home.
"This began coming into our prayers in February, right after the first group of churches was burned, the congregations there, for whoever had done this, and that's been a sort of solid prayer the whole way," Jackson said.
But, on Wednesday, as word spread that two of the suspects in the fires, Nathan Moseley and Russell DeBusk, were Birmingham Southern students, the prayers turned deeply personal.
"From now on, Birmingham Southern is connected to ... nine Baptist churches in southwestern Alabama, a connection we didn't know we had, but we do now, and we're going to honor that connection," Jackson said.
The identification of the arson suspects has sparked a movement to honor those burned out of their sanctuaries.
"I don't know if I'd want a bunch of unskilled laborers building my church, but I would want the love and the energy and the great passion these students can bring to a project. I mean, they're ready to go right now. They would be there right now if they thought it would help," Jackson said.
Jackson said the first step is getting to know members of the churches. From there, he hopes they will work together on short- and long-term rebuilding plans.
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http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/tucker/stories/031206.html
The devil made arsonists do it? Oh, heck, no
Published on: 03/12/06
Here in the Deep South, the buckle of the Bible Belt, a man who sets fire to churches is believed to be Satan's personal representative. So, last month, when arsonists struck five rural Alabama churches in a few hours — and four others days later — the locals assumed that evil was stalking the countryside.
Who attacks houses of worship but men distorted by hate? Who preys on small backwoods sanctuaries but the cowardly and small-minded, pumped up by their pretensions to power? Who tries to destroy a community's center, its soul?
As it turns out, those who do such things may not look like demons or spew hate like demented psychopaths. Last week, authorities announced the arrests of three upper-middle-class college students — Russell Lee DeBusk Jr., 19, Matthew Lee Cloyd, 20, and Benjamin Nathan Moseley, 19 — young men with no apparent criminal histories. As Alabama Fire Marshal Richard Montgomery told The New York Times: "My profile on these suspects is shot all to heck and back."
[snip]
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http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/1142072379278940.xml&coll=2
Possibility of release delayed for 3 suspects
Ages, past make chances of bond good, experts say
Saturday, March 11, 2006
VAL WALTON
News staff writer
Three suspects in nine church fires will wait until Wednesday to learn whether they will be released on bond. Legal experts say their chances are good.
The detention hearing for Matthew Lee Cloyd, 20; Russell Lee DeBusk, 19; and Benjamin Nathan Moseley, 19, was delayed from Friday at the request of defense lawyers.
"We need it in order to make a decision on how we choose to go forward," said Tommy Spina, Cloyd's attorney.
Moseley's attorney, Bill Clark, said he hasn't decided if he will seek his client's release. Moseley apologizes for what happened, Clark said. "He will forever regret the difficulties and anxiety that have resulted from his behavior."
The hearing Wednesday will be before U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Armstrong Jr.
Prosecutors want the three to stay in jail. They have been at the Shelby County Jail since their arrests Wednesday.
They are charged in a two-count criminal complaint with conspiracy to damage and destroy buildings by fire, and a count of maliciously damaging and destroying by fire the Ashby Baptist Church in Brierfield.
The judge could release them with conditions. They could go to the custody of a third party, such as parents. He could require electronic monitoring. They could be placed in a federal halfway house. He also could require property or cash bonds.
Cloyd, DeBusk and Moseley have a good chance of being released because of their ages and their having no criminal histories, lawyers and a law professor said.
Moseley and DeBusk attended Birmingham-Southern College until they were suspended and banned from campus after their arrests. Cloyd transferred from BSC to the University of Alabama at Birmingham as a junior pre-med student.
"It seems these young men have connections to the community," said Don Cochran, a professor at Samford University's Cumberland Law School and a former prosecutor. "It's not like they are passing through Birmingham."
Their cases also must go before a federal grand jury within 30 days of arrest. Alternatively, a magistrate judge could conduct a preliminary hearing to determine if the charges should stand.
"Theoretically, they're going to be indicted," said James Sturdivant, a defense attorney and former federal prosecutor. "I can't imagine they can get a complaint and can't get an indictment."
More charges possible:
A grand jury could add more federal charges. The three also could face arson charges in a state court.
Should DeBusk, Moseley and Cloyd be indicted, there would be an arraignment where a magistrate judge reads charges and explains rights. A trial date would be set quickly because of federal speedy trial requirements.
But attorneys for the suspects said it is too early to begin focusing on defense strategies.
"I think we're just trying to focus on how to deal with the bond issue," Spina said. "I don't think we've gotten beyond that moment in terms of the big picture."
Yes, I'm sure it was. Just 3 spoiled brats from well-to-do backgrounds having fun messing with the 'yokels'. It only they had half the intelligence they obviously thought they had...
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