MEXICO — A local man was charged Monday with setting a fire in a dormitory at the University of Southern Maine’s Gorham campus while a student there in 2012, Maine Department of Public Safety spokesman Stephen McCausland said in a press release Tuesday.
The State Fire Marshal’s Office arrested Thomas “TJ” Williams, 23, at his parents’ home on Harlow Hill Road and charged him with two counts of arson.
He was transported to the Cumberland County Jail in Portland and will make his first appearance in Cumberland County Superior Court there this week.
The fire was started at approximately 2:30 a.m. Sept. 3, 2012, in a recycling closet in Upton-Hastings Hall in Gorham, McCausland said. More than 200 students were in the building at the time, but nobody was injured.
The fire was put out by the sprinkler system.
State Fire Marshal Joe Thomas said the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives assisted investigators with the investigation, which included a “computer-generated re-enactment of the fire, and a mock fire of a replica of the closet at the agency’s laboratory in Beltsville, Md.
Williams, who later left the university, was indicted this month by a Cumberland County grand jury.
mdaigle@sunjournal.com
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- Thomas “TJ” Williams
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