Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 16, 1993 TAG: 9303160258
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RON BROWN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BOONES MILL MAN SETS HIMSELF ON FIRE
For nearly a decade, as William Bruce Sowers shuttled in and out of the Franklin County home where he stayed with friends, he burned his personal belongings rather than leave them behind.Friday, Sowers burned himself.
He was in critical condition Monday in the University of Virginia Hospital burn center.
Sheriff's investigators said Sowers tried to kill himself by pouring gasoline over his head and lighting it with a match.
A couple he lived with said he had been drinking and probably abusing prescription drugs when fire engulfed him Friday afternoon.
"I don't think he did it intentionally," said Martha Spangler, 67.
Sowers, a Vietnam veteran, suffered second-degree burns to his hands and stomach and third-degree burns to his face and head. Investigators said his lips were burned away and that the inside of his mouth was burned as he apparently inhaled the fire that surrounded him.
Wilford D. Spangler, 70, had invited Sowers into his Boones Mill home nearly a decade ago in hopes of straightening him out. Sowers was haunted by the memory of Vietnam and the alcohol addiction that sometimes would take over his life.
"I just like people," Wilford Spangler said. "I just feel sorry for people like that."
Sowers, 47, would tell how he had been shuttled from foster home to foster home as a youngster. He become so upset by his Vietnam memories that Spangler would refuse to talk to him about them.
Still, there was something about Sowers that Spangler liked. He was a good employee when the two men worked together at Draper Paving Co. in Roanoke in the mid-1970s.
Spangler, who raised eight children of his own, thought kindness would keep Sowers on a straight path. And at one time during the early 1980s, Sowers weaned himself from alcohol enough to use the GI Bill for training to do work on heating systems.
Sowers had left the Spangler home several times since the couple first took him in 1983. Each time he left, he burned in a trash barrel letters, documents and other personal papers he had accumulated.
Last March, he came back to live in the home. Then he started drinking again, which the Spanglers would not tolerate.
Friday, Sowers returned to the house after a visit to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem, Spangler said. When he walked in, the Spanglers could tell he had been drinking.
Soon afterward, they noticed that he had set fire to a trash barrel behind their house. Not long after that, they saw a ball of fire rolling across their back yard.
Wilford Spangler doused Sowers with a fire extinguisher as rescue workers arrived.
Sheriff's investigators found a plastic jug next to Sowers with a flame still flickering from it. Downstairs in the Spangler house, the couple found a near-empty pint of whiskey and empty medicine container. Inside Sowers' coat pocket was a Valium prescription filled on Friday.