LANCASTER, Pa. — Editor's note: The above video is from 2018.
The man who admitted to setting a fire that destroyed a railroad bridge on the Enola Low Grade Trail in 2018 was sentenced to serve 14 years of probation and ordered to pay more than $1 million in restitution, the Lancaster County District Attorney's Office said Tuesday.
Maxxwell Ray Redman Jr., 24, was also ordered to complete 250 hours of community service by Lancaster County Judge Dennis Reinaker at a sentencing hearing this week, prosecutors said.
Redman, spent three weeks in jail after being charged with causing a catastrophe, arson, and reckless burning or exploding in May 2020.
He later admitted to setting a fire that eventually smoldered, spread, and destroyed the bridge, a structure built more than 100 years ago spanning Pequea Creek between Conestoga and Matric townships. It took firefighters three days to completely extinguish the blaze.
Redman claimed he did not realize the fire had destroyed the bridge until after he'd left and heard about the fire on the news.
Prosecutors argued for a prison term of 6 to 23 months in addition to probation, but Reinaker noted in the hearing that Redman was 18 years old at the time of the fire, had since taken steps to turn his life around and had already spent nearly three weeks in jail after being charged in 2020.
At the time of the fire, Redman had been living at multiple locations in Lancaster County and had an unstable life. He is now married, a father of two children and employed as a salesman, according to reporting in LNP.
It cost nearly $3 million to repair the damage caused by the fire and rebuild the bridge, a popular landmark along the Enola Low Grade Trail, which is used by thousands of hikers every year. The bridge was converted from a railroad trestle into a pedestrian walkway in 2015.