ARLINGTON — A few days after fire struck Lakewood Elementary School on 16th Drive NE, the Snohomish County Fire Marshal’s Office arrested a 12-year-old male, arraigning him on a charge of first-degree arson in juvenile court on July 28.

The arrest came the evening of July 25, according to Stephanie Price, public information officer for the Marysville Fire District.

County Fire Marshal Tom Maloney said a witness report led investigators to the youth, who allegedly was seen riding a bicycle around the elementary school at the time of the fire. Maloney said more juveniles may have been involved and the overall investigation is on-going.

Maloney added the youth was being held on a $2,500 bond.

Fire struck the Lakewood school about 6:50 p.m. July 23. Lakewood Schools Director of Operations Fred Owyen said the blaze hit mostly the exterior of a wing added to the south side of the building in 2005. He said the blaze apparently started in a recycling bin stored outside the school.

According to Price, some sort of combustible material was used to start the blaze, which fire officials apparently considered suspicious almost from the start of their investigation into the incident. Price said two classrooms suffered smoke and fire damage and reported further smoke damage throughout the building.

According to Owyen, school officials were waiting for insurance investigators to formulate a final damage estimate. Price put the figure at roughly $150,000. Owyen said the school will open on schedule for the coming school year. However, the wing affected by the fire may not be immediately available. He said the timetable for repairs might be dependent on the availability of needed materials.

Whether or not the wing is open in time for school, Owyen and fire officials all are convinced quick action by a half-dozen or so civilians, including several moms, stopped the fire from spreading much further than it did.

“One of the captains on the scene reported that this fire could have been much worse and was minutes away from being a large scale fire with much more loss,” Price said.

“I think they prevented some major damage to this structure,” Owyen added.

Resident and mother of a Lakewood school student, Jamie Miller said she and other parents were watching a summer football camp practice when they noticed what they thought was smoke coming from the nearby elementary school. Miller said she and several others ran towards the school and indeed found flames engulfing a portion of the building.

“We just decided we needed to do something,” Miller said. She added that one local resident which whom she was not familiar had arrived on the scene with a fire extinguisher. She credited another mom, Dawn Taylor, with the idea of smashing out glass doors on the school in order to gain access to more extinguishers.

“We all kind of looked at each other at first,” Miller said, but the group also quickly decided getting into the building was the best course of action. They used the fire extinguisher they had on hand to break the windows.

With a few moms running in and out of the building, Miller said the ad hoc fire team soon got themselves organized.

“When one extinguisher ran out, we had another one ready,” she said, adding the group smashed quite a few windows in the process.

“It was very, very scary at first,” said another Lakewood mom Terri Virdell. Virdell said she didn’t enter the building herself, but tried to keep track of who did, making sure anyone who went in came out again.

Both Virdell and Miller figure they spent about 10 minutes fighting the fire before professional emergency crews arrived. One mom, apparently Taylor, was treated for what Price described as minor smoke inhalation at the scene.

“We were really lucky that what we did worked,” Miller said.

According to Price, the first emergency crews on the scene reported flames and smoke on the outside of the school, with fire possibly having reached the interior of the building. Firefighters attacked the exterior flames and made a forced entry into the building to search for further blazes and provide ventilation.

Crews also pulled tiling from the ceiling and were able to extinguish fire that had traveled from the exterior into the attic space of the building.