A TEENAGER who torched a family home in the early hours as a mother and her two children slept in their beds, has been locked up for four years.

Dominic Kidger, now 19, who had taken drink and drugs, did not know his victims and claimed he had been incited to do it by others who took him to the property.

He said he believed the semi-detached house in Cherry Crescent, Oswaldtwistle, was unoccupied, but he did not bother to check and children’s toys were at the front door he set alight with petrol, Burnley Crown Court heard.

The hearing was told how Carly Armstrong, 33, and her terrified four-year-old son Keenan, who had been in bed with his mother, were rescued after her plucky daughter Courtney, 15, escaped by climbing out of the front bedroom window and went to alert neighbours.

Kidger later played down what he had done, saying he ‘only set the door alight and not the whole house’.

Kidger, at the time living in Marlowe Avenue, Accrington, admitted arson being reckless as to whether life was endangered, last May 2.

The defendant, who was sent to a young offenders’ institution, had no previous convictions.

Simon Gurney, prosecuting, said Courtney woke at about 2.30am, feeling hot.

She could smell smoke, saw ‘massive orange flames’ all over the front door, and up to the bottom of the stairs, and was struggling to breathe.

The fire alarm went off and she rushed into her mother’s bedroom at the front of the house, over a porch where the fire had been started.

She was hysterical and shouting the house was on fire and they needed to get out.

Mr Gurney said the family shut themselves in the bedroom, thick black smoke was entering the room under the door, they called 999 and were advised to use a duvet to block the smoke.

They ultimately escaped via the bedroom window.

They were taken to the Royal Blackburn Hospital for treatment for smoke inhalation.

The prosecutor said accelerants were found on the inside and outside of the front door and immediately behind it.

Mr Gurney said the defendant ‘made no effort whatsoever to establish whether the property was occupied or not’, showing a ‘high degree of recklessness’.

For Kidger, David Ryan told the court his parents would say he had brought shame on a ‘good, strong, caring, loving, law-abiding family’.

He said: “This defendant knows he will have to live with that for the rest of his life.”

Sentencing, Judge Beverley Lunt said a ‘cursory glance’ of the outside of the house showed that children lived there.

She told Kidger setting fire to the main front door had cut off the escape of anybody who might be inside.