Prosecutors said David Crawford targeted people he believed had wronged him, including his own stepson.
ROCKVILLE, Md. — A former Maryland police chief was sentenced in Montgomery County to 55 years in prison after pleading guilty to arson charges tied to three fires at his stepson’s Clarksburg home, adding a new sentence to the life terms he is already serving in a broader serial arson case.
David Michael Crawford, 74, was sentenced after admitting guilt to two counts of first-degree arson and one count of second-degree arson in fires set in 2016, 2017 and 2020. The case mattered beyond one family because prosecutors said it fit a much larger pattern: for years, Crawford chose targets from a list of people he believed had slighted him, then set fires at their homes and property. The Montgomery County sentence came nearly three years after a Howard County jury convicted him in another part of the same long-running investigation.
Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy said the Clarksburg fires were part of a revenge pattern that reached across several Maryland counties. Speaking after the plea and sentencing, McCarthy said Crawford turned personal grudges into criminal targets. “If you fired him, you’d be a target,” McCarthy said. “If he had a dispute with you over some school board matter, you would become a target.” Prosecutors said the Montgomery County case involved Crawford’s own stepson, Justin Scherstrom, whose home was struck in three separate years. The fires happened in 2016, 2017 and 2020, according to prosecutors. By the time of the final fire, investigators had already begun seeing links among a number of suspicious blazes. That wider pattern, officials said, helped turn what at first looked like separate crimes into one connected case that stretched over nearly a decade.
Scherstrom said the crimes shook his family because the accused was not a stranger but someone they had known for decades. “It was devastating,” Scherstrom told reporters after the sentencing. He said he had treated earlier disputes with Crawford as ordinary family conflict and did not initially think they would lead to violence. His account gave the case a sharp personal edge: prosecutors were not describing a random arsonist, but a former law officer accused of using anger, patience and planning against people close to him as well as people from other parts of his life. Crawford’s attorney said he apologized to victims and acknowledged that he committed the arsons. The sentencing judge in Montgomery County, James Bonifant, imposed the 55-year term after the guilty plea. Reports on the hearing said the sentence is to run concurrent with the prison time Crawford is already serving from the earlier Howard County case, meaning the new punishment does not replace those earlier life terms but sits alongside them.
The wider record presented by prosecutors shows why the case drew so much attention in Maryland. Crawford is a former chief of the Laurel Police Department, where he served from 2006 until his resignation in 2010. Before that, officials said, he worked as chief in District Heights and also served as a major in Prince George’s County. Investigators later accused him of using some of the patience and knowledge developed during that career to avoid detection. In the 2021 arrest announcement, officials said he had been linked to 12 arsons from 2011 to 2020 in Howard, Frederick, Charles, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. Later court and news accounts described 13 fires across five or six counties, depending on how incidents were counted as the cases moved through separate courts. Authorities said the victims included a former Laurel city official, former law enforcement officials, relatives, medical providers and a neighbor. In one of the most striking details released by investigators, a search of Crawford’s home in January 2021 turned up what officials described as a target list containing names of known victims.
Investigators said they did not solve the case through a single witness or confession. Instead, they built it through years of records, surveillance footage and comparison of methods. Howard County officials said videos from multiple scenes showed a similar pattern of fires being started with gasoline. In the 2021 arrest announcement, authorities said the arsonist used gallons of gasoline and, in some cases, a stick wrapped in cloth. They also described surveillance images that repeatedly showed a person in a sweatshirt with the hood pulled tight. Prosecutors later told jurors in the Howard County trial that surveillance video from several fire scenes showed Crawford following a similar method from case to case. The first known fire connected to him dated to 2011 in Prince George’s County, where prosecutors said he torched an unoccupied vehicle and accidentally set himself on fire before fleeing. No one was killed in the fires tied to Crawford, but the danger was severe. Families, including children, had to escape burning homes in the middle of the night, and some victims lost much of what they owned.
The Howard County case established the legal backbone for the later Montgomery County outcome. In March 2023, a Howard County jury found Crawford guilty of eight counts of attempted first-degree murder, three counts of first-degree arson and one count of first-degree malicious burning. Those convictions covered fires in 2017 and 2018, including blazes at homes where adults and children were sleeping. A Howard County judge, Richard S. Bernhardt, sentenced Crawford on June 27, 2023, to eight life sentences plus 75 years. Prosecutors said the actual executable sentence was two life terms plus 75 years because some counts ran at the same time. Howard County State’s Attorney Richard Gibson said after that sentencing that the destruction caused by arson reached far beyond property damage because it also shattered victims’ peace of mind. That earlier conviction mattered in Montgomery County for another reason. McCarthy said his office wanted a guilty plea in the Clarksburg fires so there would still be a conviction in place even if the Howard County case were ever challenged or altered on appeal.
Officials and investigators described the case as painful not only for victims but also for the law enforcement agencies that once counted Crawford among their own. Lt. Chris Moe of Montgomery County Fire and Rescue said it was disappointing to learn that someone who had worked in public safety was tied to such crimes. Howard County officials said the investigation required years of cooperation among agencies across the state. Howard County Executive Calvin Ball said at the time of Crawford’s arrest in March 2021 that the case had potentially stopped future tragedies. Fire and police leaders said the crimes endangered residents, police officers and firefighters sent to the scenes. Those comments underscored an unusual feature of the case: the accused was not only a former officer, but a former chief whose past work had depended on public trust. Prosecutors repeatedly returned to that point in describing the harm. They argued that the betrayal deepened the fear felt by victims who had no reason to expect that an old family dispute, a workplace grudge or a neighborhood disagreement might end in flames.
For Scherstrom and the other victims, the sentencing closed one more part of a case that has unfolded for years in pieces across different courts and counties. He said after the hearing that his family was ready to move forward after years of distress and uncertainty. Even so, some questions remain outside the court record, including the full private reasoning behind every grievance Crawford allegedly carried from one target to another. What is clear from the convictions and plea is the next legal milestone: Crawford remains in state custody under the Howard County life terms, and the Montgomery County sentence now stands as an additional judgment tied to the three Clarksburg fires.