SET SCHOOL ON FIRE.

Taranaki Daily News, 30 May 1921, Page 5

SET SCHOOL ON FIRE.

BOY’S ANSWER TO CHALLENGE. By Telegraph.—Press Association. Auckland, May 28. One of the temporary aberrations incidental to growing youth, characterised by the magistrate as “adolescent insanity”, was a feature of the juvenile cases before Mr. Poynton to-day, when a lad fourteen years of age admitted that he set fire to the Napier Street School. Of unexceptional home life and previous conduct, the boy said he was in standard four, and a sentence he was set at school to correct, starting “Firemen approached the burning building”, appealed so strongly to h’s imagination that he remarked to a chum: “I’d like to see this school burning.” This was met with a challenge that he was not game to set the school on fire. In the evening he was sent a message past the fire station, the sight of which again set his imagination to work. He went to school, took his own bag and books out, and set a pile of papers alight and thrust them inside a cupboard. He proceeded to give the alarm, but a Resident next the school had anticipated him. The boy was put on probation for fave years, and his father was ordered to pay £25 damages.