Two teenagers jailed for starting fatal house fire

TWO teenagers were each jailed for 12 years today after starting a blaze which killed a woman as she rescued her two sons.

Stephen Muir, 16, and his 15-year-old accomplice broke into the home of Angela Brown in Kilwinning, Ayrshire, in 2008 and set a fire by the stairs as the family slept.

Ms Brown, 31, was awoken by the blaze at Culzean Place and managed to rescue her three-year-old daughter but collapsed while trying to save her sons, then aged 12 and six.

Last month, Muir, from Irvine, and his friend, who cannot be named for legal reasons, admitted killing Ms Brown and endangering the lives of her children by setting the blaze on September 28.

Sentencing the pair at the High Court in Glasgow, temporary judge Bill Dunlop QC said: "Your sole purpose that night was destruction.

"The tragedy is that you gave no thought whatsoever to the fact that destruction might involve the lives of the people in the house who you must have known were there.

"One of the most abhorrent features of your wickedness is that you set the fire in the stairwell."

The judge said the teenagers would have to live the rest of their lives knowing they had destroyed a family, but will have served their sentence by the time they reach the age of the mother whose life they took.