Posted on 07/29/2002 7:38:35 AM PDT by Brytani
A pipe bomb has been found at a Florida Power and Light substation in S. Florida. Fox News just had a breaking news alert on the situation. Police have confirmed that the bomb was found in Hollywood FL (Broward County) in a mail box outside the facility.
More news on this to come.
Whatever happened to that dude anyway?
We had a substation explosion here two weekends ago and as fires go it was MOST impressive. You don't want that.
It sure did, and I was really looking forward to a lot of tearful whining jailhouse interviews and psychotic scribblings from him too. :D
In Pine Island, there's more to ponder than Luke Helder's situation
By CHUCK HAGA
07/25/2002
Associated Press Newswires
Copyright 2002. The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
PINE ISLAND, Minn. (AP) - Two months have passed, and Luke Helder's name is not on his neighbors' lips. His deeds are not the stuff of coffeeshop or breakfast-table conversation in his hometown, except occasionally when someone from away asks.
His is not the unexpected face in last week's News-Record newspaper, another face so home-grown familiar, so full of youthful promise. This picture is of another of Pine Island's young, a popular and gifted collegian who was recently buried.
Much has happened in this small southern Minnesota town since early May, when Helder left school at the University of Wisconsin-Stout and, by his own admission, started leaving pipe bombs in mailboxes across the midsection of the United States.
So far, he has been charged with using one pipe bomb to damage the mailbox at a house near Tipton, Iowa. Federal authorities say he planted 18 bombs in all, with antigovernment messages, and that six people were hurt by the explosions. He was to begin trial on Sept. 16.
Now that has been delayed until Nov. 18.
In Pine Island, young people have attended a prom and a graduation since Helder's three-day rampage. The Zumbro River flooded in June, prompting a general mobilization to safeguard the town with sandbags. Farmers were still burning uprooted trees and other flood debris to clear their fields when another soaker struck recently.
"But we need the rain," people said, almost in chorus.
News that a federal judge in Iowa has given Helder more time to prepare for trial barely registered in town last week. It fluttered through like a gentle fluctuation in the weather and was remarked almost not at all.
There has been so much else to talk about and dwell upon.
The Security State Bank announced plans for an expansion into a former furniture store next door on Main Street. The town is growing -- to about 2,300 people now -- but longtime residents wonder who's planning to move in and buy the $500,000 homes that are planned around a new private lake on the community's southwestern edge.
"I guess you've gotta have some rich people in with us poor ones," said a smiling Dave Bradshaw, retired from the lumberyard.
People talked about Becky Schroeder coming home with the Minnesota High School Rodeo Association goat-tying championship, about Jennifer Berg making the dean's list at college in Fargo, N.D., and about the Pine Island Pioneers winning their amateur baseball league.
And they talked about Pamela Koelsch, and wept for her, and asked unanswerable questions.
Koelsch, 22, was everything in high school, and she was on her way to being everything at Winona State University. But she was killed in a motorcycle accident near Lewiston, Minn. Mourners filled St. Michael's Catholic Church -- the Helder family's church -- for her funeral.
"We cannot understand why what happened, happened," deacon Michael Kuebler told the overflow congregation.
But he smiled at her parents and said, on behalf of the community, "We are here for you."
Vince Fangman, an usher at the funeral, counts Luke Helder's parents, Cameron and Pamela, as friends. Like most everyone else in town, he calls them Pam and Cam. They're concerned, he said, about whether their son will face one trial or many.
"Our support for them continues," he said.
It still confounds Erin Friedrich, 18, that such things -- pipe bombs, a national manhunt, national news reports -- could draw a line to her little town.
It was Luke Helder -- our Luke Helder -- who allegedly planted pipe bombs in mailboxes in Iowa and five other states? Pipe bombs arranged in two circles, ostensibly the "eyes" for an explosive happy face?
"My mom was talking about being afraid of the mail -- before they said it was someone from Pine Island," she said.
Friedrich, waitressing this summer at a Main Street cafe, was outside her high school in early May, participating in a student program against drunken driving, when school officials suddenly herded the students inside. Helder's name had been released, and the media were coming.
But people don't spend a lot of time on it now, Friedrich said, "except for people from outside."
Bradshaw, the retired lumberyard worker, said he couldn't remember having had a single conversation about Helder since the initial burst of community self-searching.
"I think everybody has just let it pass," he said.
People who knew Luke Helder as a 21-year-old college student in western Wisconsin have described an argumentative young man who railed against conformity and believed in out-of-body experiences. He was infatuated with the grunge band Nirvana and its founder, Kurt Cobain, who killed himself in 1994; he was wearing a Cobain T-shirt when he was captured in Nevada.
Arrested in 2001 for possessing a drug pipe , Helder discussed decriminalization of marijuana with one of the police officers.
In May, Pine Island people described the Luke Helder they knew as an average kid, shy and quiet, an OK athlete and OK student, but good.
They still do.
"I hauled him on the school bus for eight years, and he was a very good kid," said Dick Wobig, 70. "His sister was a little bit of a cut-up then, and he would help me with her.
"He was an exceptionally good kid. I couldn't say one bad thing about him. I guess he got in with the wrong group or something -- bad influences."
Shelly Block tends bar at the American Legion hall, where Cam Helder is a former post commander. The Legion put on a supper for the family last week, not long after St. Michael's hosted a community potluck and prayer service for the Helders.
"Everybody's just trying to go on with their lives," she said. "It's been difficult for everybody, especially the family. But if it did anything to the community, it made it stronger. I'm pleased the way the community has stuck by Pam and Cam.
The pipe - bomb spree "had nothing to do with his upbringing," Block said. "I know that. It's a good family, and nobody can understand the why. The only person who maybe understands that is Luke."
It's been several weeks since anybody has mentioned the case to Denise Lyons, 38, who minds the counter at the Hardware Hank store downtown.
"I felt so bad for Pam and Cam," she said. "They're very nice people. But it's like it's over and done with now, and it's the family's business."
I am sure Little Luke's smile has been well wiped off his face by now.
I like "the Stone College of Hard Knowledge". < giggle >
In terms of magnitude, no -- but Broward has more than its share of Islamic loners who seem to feel the need to blow things up for Allah. There were two arrested a few months back for plotting to blow up a substation (among other things), and then there was the guy who threatened to kill the president -- not to mention Padilla and his buddy Hassoun, a money-man for the Islamic cause.
Bringing down South Florida's electric grid in 90+ heat and humidity may not be a national disaster, but you can be sure it would leave some elderly people dead from heat prostration, not to mention the damage to the local economy.
Why would you associate bikers with such an activity? Where I come from, bikers are more like the Boy Scouts, they prefer not to be associated with homosexual behaviour.
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