EDGEWOOD, Md. — Video captured by a neighbor in May of 2019 showed the inferno as fire spread through an Edgewood townhouse, and Bobbie Sue Hodge barely making it out alive.
“We were in the basement,” said Hodge at the time, “We got woke up by one smoke alarm.”
Hours later, Hodge sat outside with her dog that she had rescued grieving for those who perished in the flames.
“They were all good people,” she told us, “I hope and pray to God, God took their souls to heaven to be with Him.”
Hodge’s good fortune seemed too good to be true arousing suspicion from her neighbors looking back on it.
“I looked out the window, and the fire was just rolling,” recalled Howard Marshall, Jr., “and she had all of her stuff out sitting across the street already so I’m just like, right then and there told me, ‘She must have done it. How is she the only one that got out with her stuff and her pet?’
Fire investigators came to the same conclusion almost two months later, charging Hodge with the crime, and more than three years later, a jury found her guilty of arson, murder and assault.
Hodge now awaits sentencing facing a maximum penalty of four life sentences plus 60 years.
All for setting a fire in the wee hours of the morning that cost four people their lives and left her neighbors traumatized.
“They brought them actually right behind me right there,” said Eric Johnson, as he stood outside the townhouse, which has now been rebuilt, “The CSI when they brought them out in bags, I hate to say it like that, but when they brought them out and so forth, we didn’t realize people were still in there at the time.”
