She 'Saw Smoke.' Her Camera Shows She Was One With the Fire

Plenty of suspects hauled in by police are first caught by surveillance cameras—just not their own. That's the case with Oklahoma's Annie Durham, booked into the Oklahoma County Jail on charges of second-degree arson after authorities say footage from her password-protected surveillance camera showed she'd intentionally set fire to her neighbor's condemned home. "She caught herself on camera setting the fire," Del City Fire Dept. Chief Brandon Pursell tells KFOR, which interviewed Durham after authorities discovered on June 10 "a significant fire" stemming from the garage of the home next to the one Durham has occupied for 30 years.

"All I know is I was in the house, and I saw smoke but I was like, 'OK, maybe everything is okay. They will put it out or whatever,'" said the 59-year-old Durham. She added, "There [have] been drug addicts living there, running in and out." Fox News reports Durham later gave officials permission to review her camera's footage. Surveillance images released Monday show a woman throwing a flaming item—Pursell says it was a stick wrapped in a rag covered in lighter fluid—over a fence and through a side door of the condemned home. The chief says firefighters were at risk of "great harm." "You definitely don't resort to fire as a means of conflict resolution," he adds. (More arson stories.)