GREENVILLE, Miss. — A member of an African American church in Mississippi has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for burning the church, which was also spray painted with "Vote Trump" a week before the 2016 presidential election.
Andrew McClinton, 47, was sentenced Thursday in Greenville, WLBT-TV reported. Circuit Judge Margaret Carey-McCray also gave him 10 years of supervised release after the 10 in prison. McClinton pleaded guilty to arson on March 28.
Investigators said McClinton belonged to the church that was vandalized and burned, Hopewell Missionary Baptist in Greenville.
Some initially suspected the fire was a hate crime. But Washington County District Attorney Dewayne Richardson said McClinton was trying to hide illicit activities he had done inside the church. The night the church was burned, the members had planned to gather and McClinton believed they were going to disclose those activities, Richardson said.
Mississippi Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney, who is also the state fire marshal, told The Associated Press in March that investigators believe the graffiti was intended as a distraction from some other sort of wrongdoing.
McClinton was sentenced as a habitual offender because of previous felony convictions for attempted armed robbery in 1997 and armed robbery in 2004, both in another part of Mississippi
Greenville, about 120 miles northwest of Jackson, is a Mississippi River port city and a hub of commerce in the cotton-growing Delta. About 78 percent of the city's 32,100 residents are African American.
Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church was founded in 1905 in the heart of an African American neighborhood, and the congregation has about 200 members. Some walls of the beige brick church survived the fire, but the remaining walls were torn down. A new structure was started in its place.
After the fire, Hopewell members worshipped in the chapel at First Baptist Church of Greenville, which has a predominantly white congregation.