Attacker Sets 2 People on Fire in Washington; 82-Year-Old Man Fights Back With Cane

As reported via Fox News:

Attacker Sets 2 People on Fire in Washington; 82-Year-Old Man Fights Back With Cane

Thursday, February 01, 2007

SEATTLE — A man splashed three strangers with lighter fluid and set fire to the hair of two of them in the downtown area after his first target, an 82-year-old man, bashed him with a metal cane, police and witnesses said.

No serious injuries were reported and Paul Alexander Pearson, 51, of Seattle, was arrested for investigation of assault and held without bail in the King County Jail, police Officer Debra Brown said.

Gus Jones, 82, of Seattle, apparently the first to be attacked, told The Seattle Times that "someone threw lighter fluid all on my back and I had to rap them with my cane" during the lunch hour Wednesday at an intersection by Benaroya Hall, home of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

Jones, recovering from a broken hip, fell to the pavement but was not set afire.

"I cussed him out," Jones told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "I bent my cane."

Soon afterward, flames shot 3 feet high from a 41-year-old woman's hair before passers-by used their jackets to quell the fire, a 33-year-old bank analyst who refused to be identified by name told the Post-Intelligencer.

"Her hair was going crazy," he said. "This woman erupted into flames."

Kristen McKie, 35, of Port Orchard, who works downtown, said she was walking alongside and the flames jumped to her left arm and the back of her jacket, scorching some of her hair.

The bank analyst said he and two other men chased the man with the lighter fluid into an alley, cornered him and brought him back to the street, where they turned him over to police.

Neither woman was taken to a hospital, Fire Department spokeswoman Helen Fitzpatrick said.

A Zig Zag lighter was recovered, Officer Jeffery R. Kappel said.

There was no apparent motive, he said.

"It was a random act of violence," Kappel said. "He's got no relation to any of the victims."

The story can be found at; http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,249498,00.html

- Janq

Lessons learned: My mom told me the truism back when I was a shorty like 7 yrs. old as she was "learnin'" me how to fight to survive; "Boy, everything's a weapon!". My mom was and still is very much anti-gun even as her dad & brothers were avid hunters for food (not sport) and she married a cop. But at the same time she was pro-CCW, of anything else but a gun. She'd bought me my first pocket knife (a 2" folder) and for years all the way through my HS days she'd have me practice with and on her using it and what ever else might be on my person in addition to hands, feet, arms, legs, and knees toward not so much winning a fight but surviving by ending it as quickly as possible. Unconventional she was and very much old school thanks to her growing up amongst five brothers and living in the then Jim Crow south of MS. I suspect the gentleman in this story is same. Old school. A cane is a very good weapon, and best of all it's legal to carry in the open as well it's to most folk by appearnces completely benign. Remember evrything is a weapon. Your shoes, belt, the pen/pencil in your pocket, your shirt, their shirt (!), the keyboard I'm typing this on, and even the bag of lunch food that might be sitting on your desk...