Shrewsbury victim of arsonist firemen speaks out about gutted car
The owner of a car destroyed by firefighter arsonists has spoken out after one was jailed for five years.
Matt Willner, service manager at Severn Farm Machinery Ltd, was shocked to discover it was firemen that had started the blaze which destroyed his BMW.
Earlier this week, David Pearson, 32, of Station Road, Pontesbury, was jailed for five years and four months for his part in fires started by himself and fellow retained fireman Kingsley Tolley, 37.
Tolley, of Valiant Road, Albrighton, had been found hanged in woodland near his home in July 2015. An inquest is to be held this month. During the summer of 2014, fire service bosses noticed an unusually high number of arson incidents in the Minsterley and Pontesbury areas of Shrewsbury.
One of those blazes involved Mr Willner's car, a BMW 3 series that he sometimes kept at the Severn Farm Machinery yard near his home in Pontesbury.
The 30-year-old said: "One of my friends works for the fire service and he sent me a text saying that there had been a fire down in our yard the night before.
"I went down and all the locks were cut and you can imagine I wasn't very happy when I saw the car.
"We phoned the police and they came and spoke to us, but it was one of a lot of fires that had been going on at the time."
Police had been alerted about the unusually high number of deliberate fires in the area and it was later found the pair had started rubbish bin blazes, caravan fires and targeted a number of cars.
Mr Willner said: "We knew most of the time who it was but we had to wait for the police to be able to prove it."
The arsonists volunteered as retained firefighters in 2013 and received the same level of training as full-time firefighters.
