I understand that this stems from a neighbourhood dispute that Annie Durham appears to be on the right side of. I also understand that long simmering frustration can absolutely cloud one’s thinking. But unfortunately for her, those fluffy little anger clouds became a thunderstorm of imbecility and she didn’t have an umbrella handy. How else to explain tossing a burning object into a neighbouring home in full view of your own security camera, doing an interview with the news during which you act like little more than a witness, then letting the authorities have the password to your cameras so that they can match your face to the one on tv?
Around 2:45 p.m. on June 10, Del City firefighters were called to a house fire. They were able to knock down the huge flames in the garage by fighting the fire from the perimeter of the house.
“We knew it was a condemned house,” Pursell said.
Once the flames were out, officials said fire investigators took a closer look. Del City investigators learned there was a feud between the burnt home’s owner and the lady living next door.
“Things started adding up, being suspicious,” Pursell said.
Investigators noticed the woman had cameras in the area next to her neighbor. She gave consent for investigators to look at the password-protected recorded footage.
Thanks to help from the Oklahoma City Police Department, Del City fire officials found pictures of 59-year-old Annie Durham allegedly throwing something on fire over her fence into the neighbor’s open side door.
“It’s not a Molotov cocktail, but it’s a stick with a rag or towel wrapped around it. It had some lighter fluid poured on it,” Pursell said.News 4 actually spoke with Durham on June 10 after the fire had been put out.
“All I know is I was in the house, and I saw smoke but I was like, ‘okay, maybe everything is okay. They will put it out or whatever,'” she said.
Fire officials were anxious to get a look at the person in News 4’s video.“We knew that there was a neighbor that did an interview with you all, trying to place that person with who was seen in the surveillance footage. And, by looking at both of them, it does appear that that is the same person,” Pursell said.
Durham, who according to the video in the article later told police that she was trying to burn weeds on the property line, has been charged with second-degree arson. If convicted, she could face up to 25 years in prison.