Holden Matthews, a 22-year-old man has pleaded guilty to intentionally setting fire to three African-American churches in the US state of Louisiana. He admitted in court about his intention to set fires to St. Mary Baptist Church Greater Union Baptist and Mount Pleasant Baptist Church.
According to his statements in the court, the act was done to raise his profile as a “black metal” musician.
The statement from federal prosecutors said that Matthews pleaded guilty to three counts of intentional damage to religious property, a federal hate crime carrying a possible 20-year sentence per count.
He also pleaded to one count of using fire to commit a felony, which has a possible 10-year sentence. He entered the pleas in federal court in Lafayette. Three churches were burned in a span of 10 days, beginning in late March 2019.
Federal prosecutors did not mention whether there was a racial element to Matthews’s crimes, but hate crimes were among the charges he pleaded guilty to. Matthews is white son of a local sheriff deputy, he set fire to those churches “because of the religious character of those buildings”, they said.
“His disgraceful conduct violated the civil rights of the church’s parishioners and harmed their communities,” said assistant attorney general Eric Dreiband.
During his plea hearing, Matthews said that he specifically targeted those churches. He did so because he sought to imitate church burnings carried out by black metal music fans in Norway in the 1990s.
A member of a black metal band himself, Matthews told prosecutors he believed the acts would raise his status.He admitted to posting pictures and videos of the church burnings to Facebook “in an effort to promote himself in the black metal community”.The core elements of such contemporary performance crimes are that they are created for distribution via social media and involve both willing and unwilling performers.
Black metal community follows extreme ideology, in 1994, Norwegian black metal musician VargVikernes was sentenced to 21 years in prison for manslaughter in the stabbing death of a fellow band member and for arson attacks on three churches.
Holden Matthews made a conscious decision to randomly target and destroy churches within his own community,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Bryan Vorndran said in the statemnet. “His atrocious actions inflicted severe pain and grief upon these congregations, as well as all of St. Landry Parish.”
