Posted on 09/01/2003 8:33:14 AM PDT by restornu
Edited on 04/13/2004 3:11:23 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Friendship and a pizza-delivery job linked Brian Wells and Robert Pinetti in life.
Investigators want to know if anything connects their deaths.
Pinetti, 43, died Sunday morning in his 2525 Dobbins Road home. What otherwise would have been a quiet death investigation instead brought his well-manicured Lawrence Park neighborhood to a standstill as local, state and federal investigators poured onto the scene, all trying to learn if Pinetti's death was related to his co-worker Brian Wells'.
(Excerpt) Read more at goerie.com ...
Read More Local News
By Ed Palattella ed.palattella@timesnews.com
A barrage of media coverage made Thursday's bizarre bank robbery on Peach Street a big story everywhere from New York City to Winnipeg to Great Britain.
ABC News broadcast a report on its national news Sunday night. So did CNN.
Fox News made the robbery and Sunday's developments the lead throughout its national newscast Sunday.
Geraldo Rivera talked of the incident on his 10 p.m. Fox News show "At Large."
The British Broadcasting Co. interviewed Erie Times-News reporter Scott Westcott about the case.
The Associated Press picked up the story, putting the account in newspapers such as The Washington Post, the Winnipeg Sun and The Guardian in London.
"Bank raid pizza man killed by time bomb," read the headline to the Web site Telegraph.co.uk, a British news service.
As each report made clear, this was no ordinary bank robbery. And Sunday's development made the unsolved bank heist even stranger.
"There are three basic determinants of news. One of them is unusualness. And this is unusual," said John Kupetz, an assistant professor of journalism at Gannon University.
Kupetz, a former assistant professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, said the other two determinants of news are impact and prominence, such as when a prominent person dies. He said the bank robbery story has staying power because it is a mystery and it is strange. Everyone is trying to figure out what happened to Brian Wells, the pizza delivery man, and his co-worker, Robert Pinetti, who died Sunday.
"It is just so odd," Kupetz said.
Whenever the deaths are solved, one thing is nearly certain. The national media will be ready to gear up again.
"They will follow this, I think, until there is a resolution," Kupetz said. _________________________________________________________
Article published Aug 31, 2003 Bomb parts flown to FBI lab
Read More Local News
By Gerry Weiss gerry.weiss@timesnews.com
Erie FBI Special Agent Bob Rudge said investigators are confident they will soon solve the mystery behind the bizarre bombing death of Brian Wells.
Rudge met for nine hours on Saturday with a multi-agency task force that included law-enforcement officials from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Pennsylvania State Police, the Erie County District Attorney's Office and the U.S. Attorney's Office.
"We are looking into every facet of the incident and are conducting a complete, thorough and meticulous investigation," Rudge said Saturday night.
The task force will resume its investigation this morning when they meet at Erie's FBI office, 717 State St.
Remnants of the bomb that killed Wells Thursday afternoon on upper Peach Street were flown out of Erie Saturday to the FBI lab in Quantico, W. Va.
"We don't know yet as to why the bomb detonated or how it detonated," Rudge said. "That will be the focus when we get the forensics back from Quantico."
Rudge did not say when results of those tests would be available.
Wells, a 46-year-old pizza delivery man from Millcreek, told police he had been forced to rob the PNC Bank in Summit Towne Centre and asked authorities to help him minutes before a bomb strapped to his chest exploded and killed him.
Wells had left Mama Mia's Pizza-Ria, 5154 Peach St., to deliver two pizzas to a location at 8631 Peach St., a remote and rural area that leads to a television transmission tower.
No arrests have been made in the case, and authorities have not identified anyone as suspects.
WJET-TV captured audio and video from Wells as he sat handcuffed in front of a state police cruiser in an upper Peach Street business driveway.
"Why is nobody trying to come get this thing off me?" Wells asked police. "It's going to go off. I'm not lying."
Rudge said the bomb appeared to have hung from Wells' neck. Rudge declined to comment on the specifics of the bomb.
No one else was hurt in Thursday's explosion, which happened in front of law enforcement officers as they waited for a bomb squad to arrive.
Rudge said Wells entered the PNC bank and produced an "extensive note" demanding money and saying he had a bomb. Rudge would not provide any details about the note. Rudge also would not say if any money was recovered at the scene.
"We are confident, through what is an ongoing and extremely elaborate investigation, that we will solve this," Rudge said Saturday night.
Results from an autopsy performed Friday on Wells were not available Saturday. Erie County Coroner Lyell Cook was out of town Saturday and could not be reached for comment.
For those traumatized by the incident, the American Red Cross has assembled its Disaster Mental Health team to visit Peach Street businesses in the vicinity of the bombing.
Psychiatrists Bob Dowling and Judith Fair, among the team's members, left information at various businesses to help employees and others understand their reactions to traumatic events.
So far, nothing but holes!
That seems a little overboard.
That was a tough call to make!
Okay, I'm confused. I thought another article said it was suicide.
Or that's all they've allowed to be known yet. I wonder a little about two over-40 year olds being pizza deliverers and if the pizza shop was really just about pizza.
Where's Columbo?
He'd have a ball with this!
What an episode it would make;
Who Blew-up the Pizzaboy
Was Pinetti on the job the same day as Wells' blow up?
Could the two of them have concocted this stupid plan?
IF the bomb was a 'mini-terrorist' plot, was he a black man? Asking that, because maybe the directions to the delivery site was in a black folks section, that Wells would be familiar with, and that's WHY he got to take the delivery.(and set up to be the victim)
Most peculiar. These jobs are usually held by HS or college students.
Make no mistake, I'm very concerned about this & the way it's being (mis)handled.
Columbo represents an aspect of quality law enforcement that seems out of favor now.
Wells left Mama Mia's, 5154 Peach St., Thursday to deliver two sausage-and-pepperoni pizzas to a Peach Street address that proved to be a remote radio tower.
Authorities said he then used the threat of a bomb to rob the PNC Bank in Summit Town Centre.
Between "radio tower" and "he then used..." is a big gap about which almost mo information is reported.
10 hours after Pinetti had been discovered — there were still 10 marked and unmarked police cars parked along the road or in the grass of a playground.
Why are there no police at the so-called: "radio tower?" Why are there no statements about the identity of those who allegedly placed the bomb around this guy's neck? Didn't the victim say something about their identity? It seems from reading these reports that the issue of the man's utterances has received scant attention and that the locale of the real mystery (e/g/. radio tower) is virtually ignored.
I know more than a few. It's not unusual.
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