LITTLE ROCK — With two million-dollar homes for sale, no prospective buyers and a worsening economy steadily eroding the homes’ values, Benton-area real estate developer Aaron Jones had a strong motive for setting his Chenal Valley home on fire to collect insurance money.
Or did he?
As opening statements and testimony began Tuesday in the developer ’s federal trial on mail fraud and arson-related charges, jurors heard starkly contrasting takes on his financial status on May 30, 2008.
That’s when, sometime after midnight, someone used two five-gallon buckets of diesel fuel to douse the inside of the walled and gated 5,700-square-foot home at 43 Chenal Circle and set it ablaze.
Jones, who was home at the time, escaped uninjured - and was way too clean for his story about masked intruders to be believable, according to the testimony of some of his neighbors.
His wife, Abby, along with the couple’s two children and two dogs, were conveniently safe and sound in the family’s Florida home, prosecutors note.
But at the time, according to defense attorney Tim Dudley of Little Rock, the 34-year-old developer and lawyer had a net worth of $4.3 million, as well as $100,000 in cash readily available and the means to pay off either loan that very week, if he ever got to the point of worrying about either one.
Dudley said Jones’ net worth included “unencumbered assets of over $840,000,” including two paid-for houses in Benton, a paid-for 2008 Yukon Denali that he drove, a paid-for E-class Mercedes that his wife drove, a life insurance policy with $70,000 in equity, a house full of nearly $800,000 in antiques, and about $200,000 in bonds that he could cash in, or borrow from.
“It’s a sad day in America,”Dudley told the 11-woman, one-man jury, “when a victim of a crime is charged with a crime because an insurance company doesn’t want to pay a large claim - and that’s exactly what this case is about.”
Dudley noted that Jones was also up to date on all his debts.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Peters, however, said Jones had “made a lot of money in a hurry, and adopted a lifestyle to match his huge income” that began crumbling when the economy faltered in 2007 and 2008.
“He couldn’t make enough to keep up with his $100,000-a-month appetite for living,” she said, so he took his family to Florida, burned the house, made up a story that intruders did it, and then filed a $2.9 million insurance claim for the house and contents.
Peters noted that Jones was “mortgaged to the hilt” and that his claim did result in him getting “some relief” when an insurance company paid off the $1.2 million first loan.
He also owed a $331,000 mortgage from the home’s previous owners, and a $245,000 loan from Centennial Bank that he had used in 2006 as a partial down payment on the family’s vacation “cottage” in the Watersound Beach development in Panama City, Fla., on the Gulf of Mexico.
The second mortgage started out as a $431,000 interest free loan to be paid in increments of $50,000 with a final balloon payment of $331,000 due on May 5, 2008. Peters said that just 10 days before the fire, Jones agreed to pay $50,000, which he borrowed from his mother-in-law, to negotiate a year-long extension of the second mortgage.
Jones told police he went to sleep about 11 p.m. May 29, and was awakened at about 1:30 a.m. by noises. As he raised his head, he said, someone he couldn’t see duct-taped his eyes and mouth, then wrapped his wrists together and his ankles together. He said the intruder or intruders left him lying on his bed while they rummaged through the house, then left without taking anything.
Jones said that he managed to pull the tape off his eyes, to find that thick black smoke had filled most of the firstfloor bedroom. He said he sat up, slid his feet off the bed and hopped out onto the patio just beyond the bedroom, then made his way across the street to a neighbor’s house, where the resident called 911.
Jones reported that he fell a few times and crawled some, but neighbors testified that his white T-shirt looked clean and that they couldn’t see dirt, wounds or soot on him. Dudley showed witnesses a photograph of two red marks on the insides of Jones’ ankles, but the witnesses didn’t recall seeing those marks.
Peters told jurors that they will learn the “science behind the fire,” which will prove that if Jones exited the house as he said he did, he would have had to “walk through fire.”
The prosecutor said Jones correctly reported that a first floor set of French doors had been broken - which he said was how the intruders got inside. But she said forensic evidence will show that the doors were broken by a brand new crow bar that was later found, with paint from the custom made doors on it, tucked into Jones’ tool box in the garage, under other items.
Peters said Jones told authorities he didn’t have any duct tape in the house, but that a piece of duct tape bearing his DNA was found in a trash compactor inside the house.
Arkansas, Pages 10 on 09/22/2010