A volunteer firefighter pleaded guilty on Tuesday to starting a fire in 2009 that burned 1,500 acres in the Carlos Avery Wildlife Management Area north of the twin cities in Minnesota. The plea agreement stipulates that he will be sentenced to serve up to 120 days in jail, will be on probation for up to three years, and will have to pay restitution in the amount of $50,000 to $70,000.
From KARE11.com in 2009:
KARE spoke with two witnesses — a father and daughter — who helped lead authorities to Berken. They asked not to be identified out of fear for their safety.
They say they were driving to Forest Lake for groceries around 1 p.m. Monday when the father looked in his rearview mirror and saw something shoot out of the car behind him.
“I saw this stream of grey smoke, an explosion of fireworks,” he says. “I mean, red, white, blue, green. They just shot all over the place and it was instant flames.”
The daughter immediately called 911. They got behind the suspect’s car to get a look at his license plate, which had a red “Firefighter” emblem.
“I was really stunned,” the daughter says. “I’m like, I think this guy’s a firefighter.”
They followed the speeding suspect for about three miles but eventually lost him. Still, their description helped investigators identify Berken. He was arrested at the scene a few hours later while fighting the fire.
“I’m told he was taken into custody at one of the homes that had been evacuated,” says Lt. Paul Sommer of the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office.
The sheriff found Berken’s car parked at the fire department and later arrested him at the fire scene while he was fighting the fire.
Berken has a checkered past. In 1991 he was convicted of calling an airport and in a fake middle eastern accent threatening to blow it up. In another incident he called an airport control tower and said the pilot of his aircraft had a heart attack and he needed help landing the plane. He was sentenced to a year in federal prison for making false radio transmissions.
Berken also served 20 months in prison for several check-forgery and theft convictions.
When he first applied to be a volunteer with the Forest Lake Fire Department in 2005 he was rejected after a background check revealed his criminal history. He appealed to the Mayor at the time, Terry Smith, who reversed the decision but required that Berken serve an extended probationary period which ended in 2008. At about that same time that he was allowed onto the department, Berken, who owned a Ford dealership, donated a Ford F-350 equipped to fight fires to the fire department.
When Berken’s Ford dealership filed for bankruptcy in 2008, American Express alleged that the company used a charge card in 2007 to obtain just over $4 million in cash and had failed to repay more than $3.8 million.
Here’s a classic “Lessons Learned” for management: he flunked the background check, the Mayor overrode the Fire Department, he “donated” a very valuable truck to the Department, and then got caught as an arsonist! Anyone else see any simularities to life in their own world?
How right you are. Over a 30 year period with the fed’s I saw this happen time and time again where a person with a bad or questionable
past was hired despite in place policies and ended up as problem employee in one form or another.