A drunk arsonist started a fire in a block of south Essex flats and then made no effort to put it out, a court has heard.
Brayden Carney, already a serially convicted criminal, was subject to a court order at the time which banned him from drinking alcohol.
But in what a judge called “a state of extreme intoxication”, he lit a match and deliberately set fire to his bedroom in Bridge Road, Wickford.
One of his upstairs neighbours – a new father at home with his partner and baby – smelled the smoke, looked out of his window and saw flames coming from Carney’s flat.
He dialled 999 before fleeing the building with his young family. Firefighters quickly arrived and extinguished the blaze.
But the witness was left “very concerned about what may have happened had he and his family been asleep,” said prosecutor Gareth Hughes. “He feared dying because of smoke inhalation.”
In a hearing at Basildon Crown Court on Thursday (September 17), Judge Richard Conley said he could not suspend Carney’s sentence and jailed him for two years and four months.
“Fire setting in a block of flats is incredibly dangerous and sentences have to have a deterrent effect,” he said. “The public needs to know that this is a matter the courts take very seriously.”
He told Carney: “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what the consequences could have been, had the fire gone out of control and spread into other units.
“There could have been very substantial loss of life, or serious injury caused, or very extensive damage.”
Carney, 26, said he had lost the will to live after suffering a series of misfortunes, including the death of his grandad, the loss of his job and the breakdown of his relationship.
Facing potential homelessness, he said, he had been “using alcohol as a crutch”.
In a letter of apology, read aloud over a prison video link, he said he was “genuinely sorry” and felt guilty about the danger he placed his neighbours in.
“Being under the influence of alcohol isn’t really a good excuse,” he said. “I know saying sorry does not undo what happened. I need to make changes when I am released.”
The fire was set on May 30, said Mr Hughes, after the neighbour who later discovered the fire witnessed Carney “behaving erratically”.
After seeing the fire from his window, the neighbour ran downstairs and “could see smoke engulfing the front bedroom of Mr Carney’s flat,” the prosecutor said.
When he saw Carney, he was “unsteady on his feet and carrying a can of lager”.
The witness then saw Carney “sitting outside his flat, directly below the window from which smoke was billowing, and was making no attempt to either extinguish the fire inside his flat or try to control it.”
Carney had previous convictions for offences including theft, battery, criminal damage and being drunk and disorderly.
Defence barrister Parm Panesar said his client had been adopted at age six from parents who themselves struggled with alcohol and drugs.
Whilst Carney’s adoptive parents were loving and he was “grateful”, the lawyer said, “his feelings of being effectively rejected by his own parents did not go away.”
A sequence of unfortunate events in recent years “led to him getting ever more depressed and hiding the depression, if I can put it that way, by consuming alcohol in copious amounts,” said Mr Panesar.
But Judge Conley said Carney’s alcohol consumption was “a significant aggravating factor”, given he was subject to a court order at the time whose conditions included alcohol abstinence.
“The situation could so easily have been different and catastrophic, had the fire service not been able to gain control of the flames within a relatively short period of time,” he said.
Carney’s sentence would have been 42 months, he said, but he was entitled to a one-third discount for pleading guilty at the earliest opportunity.
He jailed Carney for 28 months.
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