Arrest made in slide fire

Haberman was arrested around 3:30 p.m., said The Dalles Police Chief Jay Waterbury.

“They just kept working on it and kept plugging away and they finally got some good information,” Waterbury said of the investigation.

Detective Travis Elton worked the case with Detective Steve Rue.

Elton, who just started working as a detective at the beginning of the year, said several leads didn’t work out initially.

A vehicle reported to have left the scene when the fire was first called in at 1:30 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 21 ended up not being connected.

Two people who posted images of the fire on the social media site Snapchat turned out to be connected with people who had reported the incident to police and so were ruled out as suspects, he said.

Then, police were given the names of some people who may or may not have been involved, Elton said.

Those people gave more names.

“Through that, we made contact with a couple of individuals today, one of which admitted being at the scene and implicated this person who I ended up arresting.”

Elton said Haberman admitted his involvement. There was more than one person involved, and Elton said the investigation is ongoing.

Elton said he understood the fire was started with a fire-starting gel. “It sounds like it was discarded shortly after the fire was set.”

He asked the suspect why he did it and “didn’t get really much of an answer other than ‘Because.’”

It was a particularly satisfying arrest for Elton.

“It felt great,” he said. He and his wife made a donation to the play structure when it was built and their son’s name is etched on one of the boards.

“This is one of those things, the community put a lot of money and work into developing that up there and when something like that happens, it gets everybody upset,” Elton said.

“We were kind of at a standstill on the case and we had one more little lead that we followed up on and that was the break that we needed,” he said. “It’s not always just us, it’s people coming to us with information, that’s how we make a lot of cases.”

“We come to a dead end and we need just a little bit more information and it breaks a case and it makes you feel good,” said Elton, who grew up here and in White Salmon and joined the police department in 2008 after working previously in security.

From statements the suspect made, it did not appear that he was on drugs at the time of the crime, Elton said.