Saline County developer’s federal arson trial nears end

— Closing arguments are expected today in the federal trial of Saline County real-estate developer Aaron Jones, who federal prosecutors say torched his expensive Chenal Valley home to collect insurance money.

Jones’ attorneys, Tim Dudley and Danny Crabtree, both of Little Rock, spent Monday presenting defense witnesses to bolster Jones’ assertions that he wasn’t in financial trouble at the time of the fire and didn’t have a motive to intentionally set the fire. Jones himself didn’t testify.

The 34-year-old businessman and lawyer claims that at about 1:30 a.m. on Friday, May 30, 2008, he was sleeping in his house while his wife, two children and their two schnauzers were vacationing in Florida, when intruders awoke him by placing duct tape across his mouth and eyes.

The intruders - he’s not sure how many - also taped Jones’ wrists in front of him, and bound his ankles together, he said. Then they went through his house and set it on fire, leaving him to work the tape loose from his wrists just enough to allow him to pull the strip off his eyes and see a wall of smoke enclosing his first-floor bedroom.

Jones said he hobbled out of the house through French doors in the bedroom onto the patio, escaping what witnesses and investigators later said were flames that eventually shot 30 to 40 feet high in the early morning darkness.

Jones was so frightened, Dudley has said, that he urinated on himself.

Prosecutors, however, say Jones, who had a net worth of more than $4 million, was nevertheless having severe cash-flow problems. The two-story 5,700-square-foot home surrounded by a six-foot concrete wall and an iron gate had been for sale for nearly a year, initially for $2.2 million, then for $1.995 million and finally for $1.849 million, with no prospective buyers.

In addition to the primary mortgage, a balloon payment of more than $300,000 that was due to the original owners had just been extended for a year at a cost to Jones of $50,000.

Meanwhile, he was also trying to sell his million-dollar vacation home in Florida, either to upgrade to a better visiting spot for friends and family, or to stem a financial crisis, depending on whom one believes.

Prosecutors say Jones was borrowing money from various companies in which he has a financial stake, just to stay afloat.

But Jones’ personal accountant, Dennis Cooper, testified Monday that the methods Jones used to shift funds around are common to businessmen like him, and that he was actually doing very well financially at the time of the fire, giving him no motive for arson.

“He had a million dollars worth of funds that were available to him during that time period,” Cooper testified.

Jones’ wife of 13 years, Abigail Jones, who is also a certified public accountant, was the first person to testify as the defense case began.

She acknowledged that the couple’s bank account was overdrawn by about $17,000 a month before the fire, but said that’s because she was busy helping clients prepare their taxes by the April 15 filing deadline and hadn’t had time to shuffle money from the couple’s other accounts to handle the overdraft, although sufficient funds were available.

She noted that the couple also were current on mortgage payments for the Florida house.

Abby Jones described her husband as “a very gruff person when you first meet him, but he’s just extremely goal oriented.” She noted that, “He told me the first month I met him I was the girl he was going to marry.”

She said the family “lost everything” in the fire, including irreplaceable photographs and toys made for their children by now-dead grandparents.

She said her jewelry and other valuable items were in a closet that was burned to its core, and thousands of dollars in cash also burned up.

Nothing was ever determined to have been stolen.

Walking through the house after the fire, Abby Jones said, she noticed that financial records she kept neatly stacked in a folder were spread out “like someone was looking for something.”

She said her husband was so distraught by the fire that he refused to stay at her parents’ house the next night because they didn’t have an alarm system.

Since the fire, she said, he is fanatical about ensuring that the porch light stays on all night in their current home in Benton, and that windows and doors are locked, and the alarm is set.

Abby Jones told Crabtree that it wasn’t unusual for the couple to have two houses for sale, “because Aaron is a real-estate developer and we always have houses for sale. ... We just usually move around a lot. We’ve moved six times in 11 years.”

Defense attorneys also presented testimony from an electrician who confirmed that on May 2, 2008, he prepared a proposal at Jones’ request to install a $6,700 home theater in the Chenal Valley home - which Abby Jones said the couple was considering taking off the market for a while.

When the trial resumes at 10 a.m. today in U.S. District Judge Brian Miller’s Little Rock courtroom, the defense is expected to rest and the government may call a rebuttal witness before closing arguments begin.

Arkansas, Pages 9 on 09/28/2010

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