A brief scare over a “suspicious device” at the Salvation Army building on the corner of Cesar Chavez and Valencia streets caused the evacuation of the center’s 125 employees and rehab patients on Tuesday morning, as well as the lockdown of nearby St. Luke’s Hospital.
After some 40 minutes, a police bomb squad determined the device was a fake.
A worker with the Salvation Army — who wished to remain anonymous — said employees there “found a bottle with liquid insides attached to what looked like sticks of dynamite” inside the loading dock of the building’s donation center. A police spokesperson said a manager then became concerned and called 911, prompting the immediate evacuation of the building at 10:15 a.m.
A construction worker at the nearby St. Luke’s construction site — who also wished to remain anonymous — recounted his evacuation.
“They told us there was a bomb threat across the street so all of us had to leave the site,” he said, adding that a group of workers were moved back a block to wait for the greenlight to head back to the construction site. “We waited there for about an hour and we had to wait for the okay to get back to work.”
Sergeant Davin Cole said officers were called to the scene and made a determination that the Explosive Ordnance Disposal team was needed to investigate the device.
“They came down, looked at it, and determined that it was designed to look like a suspicious explosive device,” he said. The bomb squad was called out, which determined that the device was a hoax after some 30-40 minutes, he said, but that it was made to look like a bomb.
“It’s possible that it was intended to scare the public but we don’t know. It may have just been a joke. Somebody [might have] made it at home and it ended up here at Salvation Army,” he said, adding that the device was in a brown paper bag.
“It was definitely designed to make someone think it could be an explosive device but it also has signs that it was meant to be a hoax,” he said without specifying what signs pointed to a hoax.
By 11:30 p.m., employees of the Salvation Army were being allowed back in the building and the lockdown at St. Luke’s had been lifted.
