As if there weren't already plenty of reasons to be glad you're not delivering pizza.. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/01/national/01ERIE.html Synopsis: police are investigating the death of a pizza deliveryman who robbed a bank in Erie, PA. When police stopped him not far from the crime he claimed he was instructed to rob the bank by a man who had forced him to wear a bomb. Apparently he wasn't joking -- shortly after the police cornered him the bomb exploded and he was killed.61 responses total.
Tom Smith is going to have to re-do "Domino Death" now.
Wow. I wonder if he put the bomb there and it went off accidently or if he was telling the truth.
Thats what the police want to know as well. They are also investigating the death of another employee at teh same pizza place yesterday. The FBI is involved.
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it must have been a small bomb. I am surprised they did not do more than they did to save him. I suppose it comes from following preceedure, which calls for the bomb squad to handle all bombs.
The story I read said the bomb squad was on the way. I've known a few Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) people. I would NOT attempt their job without training. Really. James Bond screwing out the fuze of an atomic bomb looks good on film, but I wouldn't try it in real life. It's not a matter of "following procedure"; it's a matter of knowing your limitations.
re5: what would YOU have done?
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epends on the circumstance. If it was a small bomb with a known detonation time, I would have tried to either let him remove it or tried to put something between him and the bomb. If it was a large bomb, I would have told him to sit and wait for the bomb squad. It did not seem logical to me to hand cuff him, make him sit down, and wait for a bomb squad that might or might not get there in time.
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Bolt cutter?
I've seen a photo of the thing. Might have been hard. Oddly enough, the collar survived (or at least part of it did).
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That, plus the way the thing was built was weird. Layers of metal with space between them. I can't find the photo I saw before, but they're circulating it.
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Wow. Very much like a handcuff. They would have had to use a hacksaw or diamond chain to cut thru the hinge if it was truely hardened steel. Still, if I knew he had a bomb and about how much time he had, I might offer him the chance to remove it knowing what I did might set it off. Particularly if the bomb squad was still to far away. There again, I still don't havea clear picture of how it was constructed and what methods could be used to seperate him from the explosive.
I don't either, especially given how much of the collar seems to have survived intact. The charge might have been pretty small. I'd hate to second-guess the people on the scene, though: his story wasn't believable, and he might have detonated the explosives while they were trying to help him. I noticed they leaned him up against the front of a squad car -- how much you wanna bet that the back of that car was facing everyone else, and it was pretty far away.
I finally saw the gadget on TV news, and certainly a bolt cutter would not work. It looked complicated, and not anything I recognized as standard issue. It must have taken some time to make. We still don't know how it worked, however.
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If it was just sheet metal then it would be easy enough to see if there was a booby-trap on the collar. Something like a Dremel tool with an abrasive wheel would have worked, assuming no vibration issues with the bomb. Ard apparently the bomb was quite small; it was reported to have created a "postage-stamp sized hole" in the man's chest.
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Wouldn't take as much space as bolt-cutters, and I bet a lot of cop cars have a pair of bolt-cutters in the trunk.
How often do cops need to cut bomb-collars off of people? What really bugs me about this is that the cops did not appear to have made any attempt to protect that poor guy from the bomb. They could have given him a heavy coat or something to stuff under the collar, between himself and the bomb. (They wouldn't have had to stand nearby while he crammed it in.) They could have called an ambulance to stand by to render aid if the bomb went off before the bomb squad got there. They might even have let the guy lie in the trunk of a cruiser while they drove the victim to the bomb squad. None of that was done, the guy died from a wound that might have been prevented with some thick padding, and the best clue as to the identity of the bomb-maker was lost. Lousy police work!
Nah, they'll be able to find the marker stuff in the wound, and track down the source, assuming it's a commercial explosive. But I agree on letting the guy the stuff something around the explosive. That was sloppy indeed.
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THere is still the possibility that he did this to himself.
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Re #28: I think that's pretty unfair. The police were dealing with an unknown situation, and a person of unknown mental state. The "death sentence" was issued by the person who put the bomb on the guy, not the police. Re #29: Or run up to the nearest cop, hug him, and set it off. We still don't know that this isn't some mentally unbalanced guy who did this to himself.
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...with a bomb around his neck. Presumably it was timed to go off if not neutralized first. He might have known how long he had - I would think the person that put it there would have said "you have xyz (time)....". The bomb might have been made less fatal if it could have been firmly clamped in some device that would hold the collar and divert any pieces. For instance, in the gap between those elevator doors that have parts that both slide up and down. It would perhaps also been useful to slide the bomb part to the back first. But who could have known that they had time for anything like that?
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Not many cops have experience with a situation like that one. They're just people. How could they or anyone else have known how to deal with such a situation? I say to give the cops a break.
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Re #33: >I didn't see a pooch. Just a guy that had robbed a bank. A guy who was obviously in danger, whose story was quite consistent with his actions (he robbed the bank because he was under threat of death!)... and the cops took no action to save him so he could help nail the person truly responsible. The poor pizza driver was a *hostage*. The cops treated him like a piece of meat, and their prophecy fullfilled itself in due time. The cops really and truly fucked up. Admit it. They lost their only eyewitness and let an innocent man die because they refused to recognize the weapon being used to coerce him and what it meant.
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The people who say "Hindsight is 20/20," are underestimating -- it's much better than that. What seems like a simple decision now might've been considerably less clear at the time.
Yah. Give the cops a break! Its not like this kind of thing has happened before (except perhaps in movies and novels which likely inspired this). Why do I suspect that the cops are going to have experience with this type of thing in the future? It is rather clever and will probably happen again (I seems to recall the plot of a recent bad movie that I didn't see but read about.) To prevent the collar being removed you merely pass a trigger through the collar - cut it and boom. Obviously the solution to this kind of crime is to move to a "cashless" society. Some idiot suggested "padding". Modern explosives are such that all that would do is slightly reduce the cost of the funeral if an open casket was asked for - less mortuary wax.
beady gets pretty dumb late at night... It's not a safe assumption that "modern" explosives were used. Not only was it a tiny, concealed bomb, but may well have been homebrew to avoid having the tracer compounds.
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leaving a suspect cuffed is standard procedure having to do wiht officer and suspect safety. But leaving him sitting there alone while the time clicked down may have been procedure, I am not sure it was right.
The wound was the size of a postcard, not a postage stamp, I thought.
Re #45: So you're saying they should have risked an innocent officer's life to try to remove the thing, when they knew the bomb squad was on the way? If an officer had tried to remove it and it had exploded, you would be criticizing him for killing the pizza delivery guy by "being a cowboy" and trying to remove the bomb himself instead of waiting for trained personnel. This was quite simply a no-win situation.
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And cops have bolt cutters in their squads nowdays? And how do the cops know there is a bomb before it goes off? Up until that point he was a suspect in a bank robbery and the usual practice - by the book- is to cuff 'em. Look, the cops are probably even more pissed about this as somebody used their proceedure against them and made them look bad. I can assure you that everyone involved is probably wondering how they could have improved reaction times and process to ensure better outcome in the future. The person to blame is the truely sadistic coward who made the pizza delivery guy rob the bank. Personally, I do think that it would have been nice if one of the officers had thought to toss the guy his vest to put between the bomb and he but even that would probably have be a futile gesture (would end up with a broke neck anyways).
Re #48: They should have loaned the guy a flak vest to stuff under or around the collar, if they had one. And if they were concerned about him running off they could have cuffed him to a sign (leaving his hands free). In retrospect a flak vest probably would have deflected most of the damage; given that the collar was completely intact after the fact, there were no high explosives involved. I don't buy this talk about SOP. You'd expect the poor traumatized civilian to follow orders after being hooked to a bomb, but the cops are supposed to be professionals. They are PAID to do the right thing, PAID to think in stressful situations, PAID to take necessary risks to themselves to protect the public. I didn't see them earning their pay that day.
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I still haven't heard if they knew how much time they had. I didn't say they did the wrong thing, just that I am not sure they did the right thing. I don't know what they could have done that would have worked or ifg anything they did would have. The flak vest idea probably would NOT have worked. I wear one of those, and they don't lend thamselves to bending well. If an officer had a vest witha chest plate, he might, might, have been able to interpose it. Even so, the best choice might have been water immerssion if there was a pond nearby. even though the DC would still have sent the signal, if the primer wasn't water proof, it may have doused the bang, it might have stopped the timer. Problem is, there are a lot of things I can think to try, but nothing theat was 100% positive without an expert looking at it before hand. And many of the things I can think of might have made it worse if the Bomb Squad had got there in time.
Re #52: The cops had enough time to sit around while a TV news crew arrived, set up and shot footage. That's plenty of time to do something.
"hey fellers, lets throw apples at the retard wearing the bomb necklace!"
Bruce's water immersion idea isn't a bad one. The other quick anti-bomb method, shooting it with a shotgun, wouldn't have worked out well...
I think the criminals saw the Japanese film "Battle Royale" (Original title:"Batoru rowaiaru")
I doubt they knew how much time they had. Bombs only have big red digital displays that count down to zero in the movies. I think they did the right thing -- they cleared the area and waited for the experts to arrive. In this case it didn't work, but 99% of the time it would have.
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I suspect that there were things they could have done that they didn't, but I also suspect that given how little they knew about the actual circumstances leading up to their interaction with this guy, there was little that they reasonably should have chosen to do other than what they did.
Again, the collar survived the blast. IF they had thought to put a flak vest between his body and the device force of the blast if anything would have jerked the collar forward even more probably breaking his neck. The dude was probably a gonner no matter what the cops did given the limited amount of time the cops had.
You have several choices: