Teen starts 8 fires in 24 hours: ‘Dad told me sooner or later I would go to prison. I showed him.’

The boy wanted to “give [his father] something to think about”

“My dad said that sooner or later I would end up in prison,” a 16-year-old boy reportedly told Shenyang police after he was apprehended on suspicion of committing arson. “Well, I showed him.”

Smarting from the barb, which he claimed was part of a broader pattern of physical and emotional abuse, the boy, identified in local media only by the surname Jiang, decided to “give [his father] something to think about.”

Within a twenty-four window, he lit eight trash fires, all in the same Shenyang neighborhood. Firefighters trailed him in cartoonish fashion, left scarcely enough time to extinguish one blaze before they were alerted of the next.

It is not a testament to the detective sense of local authorities that a child intent on being arrested, who clustered all of his misdeeds in such a small radius, escaped police notice for as long as Jiang did.

Only after the seventh fire did police consult security footage and realize that each was preceded by the same boy in a grey coat loitering about at the scene and kneeling to the ground with an unidentifiable object in hand.

At the scene of the eighth and final blaze, Jiang waited for the crowd to dissipate, until only he and the authorities remained, at which point one of the officers recognized and arrested him.

When police asked the boy if he knew why he was being taken into custody, Jiang immediately confessed to lighting the fires and divulged his underlying motive: being really, really pissed off at his dad.