From Staten Island-Arson investigators and NYPD Hate Crimes Unit detectives are probing a weekend fire inside a Staten Island church.
Authorities say a glass bottle containing flammable liquid was thrown through an open front window of St. Paul's Memorial Episcopal Church in the Stapleton section sometime between noon Saturday and 10 a.m. Sunday.
"Sunday morning during the Mass, someone came down the side aisle and saw that there were burned rags, broken glass in the aisle," the Reverend Frederick Schraplau said. "We recognized it as a Molotov cocktail."
The church was closed the entire time, and the fire caused minor damage to the floor.
"We don't have air conditioning, so we leave the windows open to cool it off overnight," Rev. Shraplau said. "So somebody obviously tossed it in. We were lucky the window doesn't open all the way. This way, it was just sort of lobbed in as opposed to deep within the church. If it had landed on the pews or the wooden floor, we really would've had a massive fire."
More here-
http://abc7ny.com/news/si-church-arson-being-investigated-as-possible-hate-crime/1373789/
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