He Set Two Family Cars Ablaze at 4 a.m. — Then Fled With His Own Hand on Fire Before a 100mph Police Chase
In the dead hours before dawn on 9 March, two cars sat on a driveway in Stoke Road, Slough. A family, including children, was asleep inside the house. CCTV later showed a man crouch between the vehicles with a jerry can, soak them in fuel and set them alight.
The fire took hold almost at once. As the cars became infernos, the man ran. Footage captured him shaking his right hand hard: it was on fire. He reached his own vehicle and sped away. Flames licked toward the front of the house. Occupants woke to smoke and heat and fled into the street. No one was physically injured. The cars and part of the property were badly damaged.
Police named the man as Krzysztof Orzechowski, 32, of no fixed address. Six days later, officers tried to stop a car linked to him. He did not stop. On country lanes he overtook other drivers at speed, reaching about 100mph. He lost control on a bend, crashed, and was arrested unhurt.
At Reading Crown Court he pleaded guilty to arson with intent to endanger life and dangerous driving, plus possession of cocaine and cannabis. On 19 August he was jailed for five years and seven months, with a three-year extended licence. He was banned from driving for a year after release and ordered to pay a surcharge.
The legal charge of arson with intent to endanger life is not about whether anyone died. It is about what a reasonable person would expect when two fuel-soaked cars burn metres from a sleeping household in the small hours. Fire can jump. Smoke can fill rooms before anyone wakes. Children cannot self-rescue as adults can. The family escaped; the risk was still grave.
The victim impact went beyond metal and paint. The household described a home that no longer felt safe: sleep broken, nerves constantly taut, daily life reorganised around fear that it could happen again. That is a common pattern after night-time arson at a residence. Property can be repaired. The sense that the street and the driveway are ordinary again often takes far longer.
The burning hand is not a punchline. Accelerant on skin and clothing ignites easily; panic makes it worse. The same clip that shows the cars erupting also shows the offender trying to beat out flames on himself while leaving the scene. It is evidence of how close he stood to the fuel he had poured.
The later chase added a second public danger. A 100mph flight on lanes used by other traffic turns an arrest attempt into a moving hazard. He crashed rather than being forced to a controlled stop. Officers described the driving as reckless. The court treated both the fire and the pursuit as serious.
Thames Valley Police called him a dangerous offender and said no one was hurt only by fortune. Detectives stressed they would keep pursuing this type of offending and supporting those whose homes were attacked.
Motive was not fully spelled out in open court beyond the admitted offences and the drugs found. What is established is sequence and harm: a pre-dawn attack on vehicles at an occupied house, self-inflicted fire during flight, a high-speed attempt to escape days later, and a prison term that reflects risk to life rather than mere vandalism.
For the family, the night did not end when the engines cooled. The driveway is still the place where two cars burned while they slept. The sentence closes the criminal case. It does not automatically restore the feeling that 4 a.m. is safe.
