BATON ROUGE – A Lafayette man is behind bars for allegedly torching a home on North Flannery Road. 

Investigators with the Baton Rouge Fire Department say 31-year-old Charles Terrell Fendley used an open flame device to set fire to a vacant home on September 23.

According to a police record, a witness told investigators he and Fendley were riding in a vehicle belonging to Fendley’s deceased mother when Fendley said he intended to burn down the home of someone who’d died. The witness told police the vehicle they were using smelled strongly of gasoline, and when Fendley asked the witness to accompany him to the home he planned to burn, the witness declined. 

Investigators say they spoke with a second witness who says Fendley asked to borrow their vehicle to go to the store and then didn’t return with it for hours. The witness went on to say when they contacted Fendley, he told them he was “in the woods” and didn’t return the borrowed vehicle himself, but had someone else bring it back to the witness. The witness told officials their vehicle was returned with a strong odor of gasoline.  

On Tuesday, Nov. 5, Baton Rouge Fire Department Investigators caught up with Fendley in Lafayette, arrested him for simple arson, and booked him into East Baton Rouge Parish Prison.

This wasn’t Fendley’s first brush with the law, he’d been arrested for DWI on multiple occasions.