The fire at the prosecutor's office is, as the dean of Lancaster County's lawyers, Francis Bell, put it, "An attack on the justice system, the court system, an attack on the institution itself."
But these fires are also, in the words of Michael Hemlepp, who worked in that prosecutor's office, who plied his trade in that courthouse, "sadness."
Hemlepp is director of the S.C. Association for Justice, a group that works to guarantee the rights of people accused in crimes. The Lancaster courthouse and that prosecutor's office are where the institution of the courts, where the government by the people and for the people attempts to make sure people aren't brutalized by those who would maim and firebomb.
Hemlepp is right about sadness. The mood in the blocks around that courthouse Thursday must be like some days in places near burned public institutions in places with names such as Baghdad or Jerusalem or Karachi. Barricades kept traffic away.
This could not be little Lancaster, right? This must be a place where the way to handle hatred for the courts, or the decisions made by the men there, is to burn the place down.
On one corner north of the courthouse sits a restaurant called Leigh Anne's, a favorite haunt for so many with courthouse business. Marc Culler, trying to get the lunch orders out, said, "People have anger, and disappointment. Go ask them."
So I did, and a lady named Judy Starnes said, "The cops are going to catch who did it, and the courts still have records. I don't know what anybody thinks they can get from this."
Phillip Haynes piped in, "Maybe it will make all the places around here more aware of what kind of people are out there."
Up on Main Street, past the barricades, sits the Eurest restaurant, where so many from the big KMG insurance company eat lunch.
"Two-hundred people-plus in our place, that would be an easy target," Johnie Flint said.
Those around the table agreed that until somebody is charged, nobody knows what's next. There is anger, uncertainty about the future, bewilderment that it could happen in Lancaster.
"Could be somebody fixated on the government," Tony Simone said.
"Obviously, this person is mentally imbalanced, has an ax to grind," Ron Groover said.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms says somebody tried to burn down the office of the solicitor, the man in charge of prosecuting alleged criminals, Doug Barfield.
"This is a step beyond, this is personal," said Bell, the lawyer, who has spent 39 years trying to show the world, in these very buildings that smell now of smoke and rage, that American justice is not perfect, but it's the best system there is on the planet.
The criminal justice system in that prosecutor's office and courthouse is about enforcing the rules of society, Hemlepp said. The courts are a system to resolve disputes, he said. The system, he said, even when knocked from its feet like this week, will survive.
I hope Hemlepp is right, because the barricades Thursday didn't look promising.
"Unusual vileness to attack anonymously in the dark of night," said Francis Bell, who has talked and argued so many times in that burned courthouse, met countless times with prosecutors on cases in that burned office.
Real-life prosecutors such as Doug Barfield have little of the glamour of TV or movies. Cases mount as the dead and wounded pile up and the drugs keep coming to places such as Lancaster. Yet, they march on.
One time in June 2003, I watched Barfield's predecessor, the late great John Justice, walk out of that now-burned prosecutor's office to deliver words in that now-burned courthouse to a jury about a drug dealer who killed a man and kidnapped the man's wife. Justice told jurors his daughter so many years before saw a man shot on TV -- the show was "Vegas" with Robert Urich -- and sobbed uncontrollably.
"What's wrong, honey?" Justice said that night.
"There's bad people," his daughter said.
Justice asked his daughter: "Do you know what happens to bad people?"
She said bad people go to jail.
"Do you know who puts bad people in jail?" Justice asked his daughter.
"The good people, Daddy," Justice's daughter said.
Justice said that day five years ago: "Now I leave this case in the hands of the good people. You. The jury."
Before his death, Justice said these words: "You go home a few times a year and say I made this a safer community. You do it long enough, you go home at night and say I may have saved a few lives."
A couple of years after he dies after 28 years of helping victims of rage and drugs and hate, somebody burns the old courthouse, where justice tried to poke its head into our lives every so often. And then three days later, someone apparently burns his old office.
Sadness just about covers it.
