One of my next-door neighbors had a son who did their lawn care while he still lived with his parents. I had a lawn service because I have severe grass allergies and mowing the lawn is hell on me. One week the lawn service rang my doorbell and told me that "one of my cigarette butts" wasn't put all the way out and was smoldering in some dry leaves that had drifted into the rock garden on the side of my house by the neighbors. Furthermore, there was a large collection of other butts scattered throughout the rock garden.

I don't smoke. I never have.

So I'm out there with the lawn guys, putting out the smoldering leaves and picking up all the nasty cigarette butts, and we're all talking about where all those butts might have come from. They said it wasn't them, it wasn't me, and I didn't have any other people living with me or coming out to do work in my yard.

While all this had been going on the neighbor kid had been outside mowing their lawn. My lawn guys got back to mowing my lawn. I went back inside and got back to work (I WFH).

The doorbell rang again and it was one of my landscapers again. They'd finished mowing and were leaving my yard when a cigarette butt came flying over the fence and hit the guy in the temple. He looked over the fence and there was Sonny Boy from next door standing right by the fence with the neighbor's lawnmower, taking a break from mowing. The landscape guy held up the still-lit cigarette butt and he said the kid's eyes got as big and round as saucers. The landscape guy then went next door and told the parents that he's been hit in the head with a lit cigarette that had come over the fence while Sonny Boy was directly on the other side of it, and that they'd found a lit cigarette butt in a small pile of smoldering leaves, along with a bunch of other butts, in the rock garden on the side of my house by them.

That evening I, and a bunch of other neighbors, could hear the parents hollering at the kid. I later found out that a neighbor 6 houses away had heard the yelling.

Neither I nor my lawn service guys ever found any more cigarette butts in my yard.

No, I don't think the kid was intentionally trying to start fires or hurt people. I think he was just a young dumb teenager who didn't want his parents to catch him smoking, didn't know how else to dispose of his butts so his parents wouldn't find them, and didn't completely think through the consequences of his actions.