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After deliberating for less than an hour, members of a Rockbridge County Circuit Court jury last Wednesday found Jermale Jerome Fitz, 37, of Glasgow, guilty of the destruction of property, a Class III misdemeanor, but not guilty of felony arson and statutory burglary, in connection with a fire that destroyed an historic Glasgow house.
The verdict came just over a year after the defendant was taken into police custody for instigating a fire that destroyed the Echols farmhouse, located at the intersection of U.S. 501 and Va. 130 just north of Glasgow.
After hearing testimony from the property owners, law enforcement and first responders, and psychiatric experts, the jury essentially ag- greed with Fitz’s defense team of Jessica Armstrong and Samuel Thomas that this was all just an accident. -It was a cold, treacherous night as a winter storm made its way through the county on Jan. 16, 2022.
At the time, the house was locked and untouched, waiting for another visit from the Echols family. The house had been in the Echols family since 1855 when it was originally built. Over the years, the residence became a vacation spot for the family where they could enjoy the little town of Glasgow where the Maury River meets the James.
The ownership of the property stayed within the Echols lineage, but had evolved into a 32-member family corporation, which shares fiscal and maintenance responsibilities of the property. In the year before the fire, family members visited the house more than 180 days, and “family members [were] there more often than not,” family member and partial owner Edward Kropf said in his testimony. The house, which was roughly 4,200 square feet, was always well-kept and ready to welcome visitors. It was fully furnished with at least $200,000 worth of assets inside, Kropf noted.
Anne Palmer, another family member and partial owner, was the last person to have visited the house before the fire. She had just celebrated Christmas there and she had briefly visited the house on Jan. 14 just days before the incident. In her testimony, she assured the jury that the house’s electrical fixtures were working properly, and she remembered the house was safe and secure when she left.
On the night of Jan. 16, Glasgow volunteer firefighter Sheldon Snead was surprised when he saw a bright glow in the sky as he was leaving Grocery Express in Glasgow after a long day of work.
“I noticed there was a glow in the sky, and I knew that it wasn’t normal at that time, so I went to investigate the source,” Snead said in his testimony.
He reached the intersection of U.S. 501 and Va. 130, and when he arrived, he saw that Echols farmhouse was enveloped by flames. He ran to the north side of the house toward the front entrance where he noticed the door had been pried open and left ajar. After yelling inside to see if anyone was trapped inside with the fire, Snead called 911, he said.
While he waited in the cold snow for his colleagues of the Glasgow Volunteer Fire Department to arrive, he recorded a video of the fire ravaging the property. The video, taken around 6:20 p.m., was used as evidence in the commonwealth’s case against Fitz.
Around the time Snead was discovering the fire at the Echols farmhouse, Jermale Fitz was sitting in a corridor of Carilion Rockbridge Community Hospital describing the terror he had encountered that night. He had been taken to the hospital by EMS after calling emergency services to the Natural Bridge Country Store. He told them he was cold and having trouble breathing. The Rockbridge County Sheriff’s Office was dispatched after Fitz remarked that a group of men had been trying to kill him.
Deputy Tanner Fix had just clocked in for his shift when he was called to meet EMS with Fitz at the hospital. While Fix was waiting for EMS and Fitz to arrive, he received a transmission through his radio system calling units to a fully involved structure fire at a location in Glasgow.
“At the time, I didn’t think anything of it,” Fix told the jury.
Fix recognized the patient as Jermale Fitz from interactions they had prior to their encounter on Jan. 16. As Carilion nurses were doing preliminary tests, Fix casually asked Fitz what the trouble was.
“Mr. Fitz said he had been in Glasgow the night prior,” Fix testified. “He stated that a group of people had been chasing him and he believed they were trying to kill him. He referred to the group multiple times and did identify one person by name. He stated that the group chased him all over Glasgow, up and down, I believe he said towards his residence and away from his residence several times.”
He continued, “[Fitz] stated that he had attempted to run out of Glasgow, so he was running on [Va.] 130 towards the bridge and out of Glasgow. When he noticed that the group was still behind him, at that point he stated he cut through the cornfield and ran down towards the river. At this point, things kind of started to click and just coincidentally that I knew about the structure fire at this time …” “He told me that he ran to the right of the bridge through the cornfield [on the right hand side] and towards the river. He said he hunkered down for a little while, caught his breath, and at that point he noticed what he believed were the people still behind him …,” Fix said. “At that point, he stated that once he heard what he believed to be the people still chasing him, he said that he jumped into river and swam across. He said that he went up the bank on the opposite side towards what he believed to be the old, abandoned house. He stated that he ran up the steps, forced the door open because it was locked, ran up a set of steps to a room, which he described on the right and barricaded himself in.
“Mr. Fitz stated that he began to light the blankets on fire as he stated he was trying to send smoke signals for help,” Fix continued.
“He was hoping someone would see him and locate him to save him from these people he believed to be chasing him … He couldn’t say how long he had been inside the house, but when he thought it was safe, at that point, he ran out of the house and back towards the intersection of Route 501 and 130 where he made contact with a snowplow driver. He had gotten a ride from the driver and that’s how he had gotten up to the Natural Bridge Country Store,” Fix concluded.
With the suspicion that the fire was possibly a case of arson, Rockbridge County Cpl. Kenny Randozzo approached his investigation of the Echols property as a crime scene.
Around midnight, the fire was still underway when Randozzo arrived at the scene, which was “very chaotic,” he said in his testimony. He began searching the surrounding area for any clues indicating that someone had been on the property prior to the arrival of the fire department.
Navigating the property with a standard K-9 search, Randozzo found footprint indentations that had been lightly covered by the falling snow. On the north side of the property near U.S. 501, Randozzo noticed footprints that “without being 100 percent [certain]” were coming from the river bank, he said in his testimony.
He found a similar set of footprints near the property’s white picket fence on the northwestern side of the property and another set of prints consistent with the those that ran towards the adjacent cornfield, Randozzo noted. Randozzo had taken multiple pictures from different angles of the house that were shown to the jury and used as evidence in the commonwealth’s case.
Days later, on Jan. 18, Virginia State Police Senior Special Agent Mark Austin took his turn in evaluating the circumstances of the fire at Echols farmhouse.
The house, which Austin spoke fondly of from his years of growing up in the county, had been reduced to only one standing wall by the fire, he said.
Austin collected “any and all” pertinent data that would aid him in understanding the origin of the fire and the extent of its damage, Austin told the jury.
He began his investigation with the 911 call received by firefighter Snead, he interviewed witnesses and the property owners, and he inquired about any malfunctions or issues with the house’s electoral or heating systems that predated the fire of which he found none.
One of the property owners, Burkes Echols, had installed a Nest programmable thermostat system that illustrated the state of the house on the day of the fire. The Nest system consisted of multiple sensors strewn about the house on both the first and second floors. These sensors collected and reported data on the house’s temperature, humidity, and heat index, Echols noted to the jury.
At 4:30 p.m., the temperature of the farmhouse had begun to rise. By 4:51, the fire alarm began indicating that something was wrong, Echols said after reviewing the system’s data retrieved following the fire.
He was particularly concerned by the first floor’s thermostat reading. The room’s temperature had elevated 19 degrees within six minutes. “I can’t think of a scenario with the exception of a fire or someone holding something under the thermostat to have that increase in temperature in that short period of time within a room,” Austin commented.
After eliminating all other potential causes, Austin deducted that this was an incendiary fire – a man-made fire intentionally set in a place where a fire should not be, he informed the jury.
Determining where the fire began proved to be difficult for Austin, but with Snead’s video, he could deduce that the fire began in the southern part of the house. This also coincided with Fitz’s story of which room he had allegedly barricaded himself in to escape the people chasing him.
What seemed unlikely to Austin was the detail of Fitz’s story in which he threw the ignited blankets out of the second-story window. Based off the level of destruction, the data of the Nest thermostat system, and the component of the moist, snowy weather conditions, Austin found it more probable that the fire was cultivated from within, he said. - This discrepancy between Fitz’s story and Austin’s discoveries did not deter from the defense’s argument that Jermale Fitz was incapable of making rational decisions on Jan. 16.
The defense called on Eugene Simopoulos, a boardcertified general and forensic psychiatrist who completed a psychiatric evaluation of Fitz in January 2023.
Simopoulos evaluated Fitz’s mental state and ability to form intent at the time of the offense, he said. The doctor reviewed an extensive amount of background information on Fitz to formulate his report. He studied Fitz’s background and standard social history, employment history, jail records, and medical and hospital records along with medication diagnosis. Simopoulos also completed a forensic evaluation of Fitz and collateral interviews with family members and coworkers, he said.
From this, Simopoulos formally diagnosed Fitz with a couple of “severe mental illnesses” – bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and PTSD from his deployment in Kuwait where he endured a number of life-threatening experiences. Symptoms of these conditions are paranoia and the belief of being targeted, racing thoughts, delusions, behavioral disturbances, and disorganization. These conditions can be severe in that they instigate a “steady decline in function” and a “drop in engagement with society,” Simopoulos said. He noted that these conditions can become debilitating in that the victim cannot “reliably function within society.”
At the time of his offense, Fitz had not been taking his prescribed medications to combat these illnesses, and he was also under the influence of copious amounts of methamphetamine, Simopoulos said. Fitz had been snorting half of a gram of methamphetamine daily prior to Jan. 16. The doctor noted that a dual diagnosis of mental illnesses and substance abuse is common, making it hard to determine what really causes an individual to act in an irrational manner.
This difficulty encourages forensic psychiatrists to consult collateral sources that can provide a cohesive evaluation of the individual’s mindset. When evaluating Fitz, Simopoulos believed that his use of methamphetamine was not the key accelerant in Fitz’s behavior.
“Mr. Fitz has been consistent in what he perceived that night. The same history he provided the emergency room is the same history he provided to me and it’s the same history he provided in the jail records as well. That would be that he, in his mind, was confronting a life-ordeath situation, a dangerous, potentially lethal situation,” Simopoulos said.
He continued, “[Fitz] perceived that he was being tailed by three individuals who were armed and going to kill him … he sought assistance. He went to a trailer park to alert a friend to get protection were his words, so he was incredibly paranoid … he went into fight-or-flight mode and he fled.
“As he escaped, he swam across the river, he entered this house, and he has told multiple individuals that his intent was not to burn a structure to the ground – his intent according to all the records that I received was that he was trying to avoid hypothermia given that he just swam across a [river] in January, and also alert anybody out there that he needed help desperately. So, he lit these blankets to get warm but also to summon help that he will say never came.”
Simopoulos could not estimate how much of Fitz’s behavior could be attributed to his illicit drug use or his mental illnesses, but he believes that the culmination of the two hindered Fitz from forming the intent to burn the Echols farmhouse.
“In my opinion, the severity of his symptoms, which were likely multi-factorial in cause relating to his mental illness but also his illicit drug use, destroyed his ability to act deliberately and purposefully to engage in actions that were criminal,” Simopoulos told the jury. “In my opinion, he did not have the mental capacity at the time to form in his mind a plan to enter a structure, light it on fire, and engage in the charges for which he has.”
Simopoulos was the only person called to testify by the defense and his was the final testimony the jury heard before beginning its deliberations.
The jury found Fitz not guilty of the felony charges of arson and statutory burglary, but did find him guilty of the destruction of property, a misdemeanor.
