Posted on 05/02/2008 9:15:26 AM PDT by raccoonradio
SWAMPSCOTT — A middle-school student had the ends of two of his fingers blown off yesterday by a homemade bomb that went off inside his Melvin Avenue home, authorities said.
The victim's brother said rescue workers could find only one of the fingertips.
The 13-year-old victim, identified by family and neighbors as Joel Surette, was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston by ambulance.
"First, he was screaming for five minutes," said his brother, Michael, 17, "He said, 'I can't believe I blew off my fingers.'"
Joanne Schumann, who lives two houses from the Surettes, was eating dinner with her family at 5:10 p.m. She didn't hear an explosion but saw Joel come out of the home with his arm covered in blood.
"He was white as a sheet," Schumann said. "He sat down in front of his house."
Michael Surette said he called 911 when he heard the bomb his brother made go off inside their home. He said the bomb contained gunpowder from about 100 toy caps that was placed inside a cardboard container with duct tape wrapped around it.
The brother added that the tip of the middle and ring fingers were blown off, and the bone was exposed on one of them.
Police said the 13-year-old was the only one hurt in the explosion and said his injury is not life-threatening.
Police had been called to the same part of town, just steps from the Lynn line, on Saturday for a report of a loud explosion.
That explosion set off car alarms, but police could not find the person responsible.
"Investigators are determining if the same person was responsible for each explosion and the possibility of criminal charges," a press release from the Swampscott police stated.
Police treated the home as a crime scene and spent almost two hours inside collecting evidence from the house and from the garbage cans at the side of the dwelling.
At 7 p.m., Detectives James Schultz and Ted Delano walked out of the home with a number of brown paper bags and left the scene. Assisting Swampscott detectives was a trooper from the state police hazardous device unit. The Swampscott Fire Department and Action Ambulance were also at the scene.
This isn't the first time local police have dealt with the premature explosion of homemade bombs made by teenagers.
In March 2007, a Swampscott High School freshman suffered burns to his face when a bomb he made using instructions he found on the Internet went off. That bomb was made with common household products.
Why, he was just going for his Bomb Making Boy Scout Merit Badge.
>>rescue workers could find only one of the fingertips.
Ah, "Fingertips (Pt 1)". Stevie Wonder.
>>"First, he was screaming for five minutes," said his brother, Michael, 17, "He said, 'I can't believe I blew off my fingers.'"
Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!
Gee, you make a bomb, it goes off, and it blows off your fingertips. What a surprise.
>>Police had been called to the same part of town, just steps from the Lynn line, on Saturday for a report of a loud explosion..."Investigators are determining if the same person was responsible for each explosion"
I'm guessing it is.
>>Police treated the home as a crime scene
Improvised explosive device--does al Queda have a cell in Swampscott, MA?
>>This isn't the first time local police have dealt with the premature explosion of homemade bombs made by teenagers.
Yes, yes, it's a common occurance I guess! Just a typical teenage activity.
Am I being insensitive when I say that everyone making homemade bombs should have his fingers blown off or worse?
As someone on the Salem News website noted (comments) he will be reminded of his stupid move every time he goes to use his mutilated hand..
This is pretty tame stuff- I'm guessing that the "fingertips" that he lost were just chunks of skin. A painful lesson about the dangers of using "contact" explosives but he'll recover. At least he was smart enough to use cardboard- a lot of kids use steel or copper pipes.
Yeah, you’re also a jerk. Kids have been making stuff from firecrackers, caps and stuff for years. Most of them aren’t doing anything evil.
Typical teenage kid. Hopefully he won’t be maimed for life — not by the homemade fireworks, he’ll live with that, but by being charged with some crime and given a criminal record and possibly being sent to juvenile hall — for being a kid.
some teenage boys are risk-takers looking for a thrill. 20 years ago, when i was a teenager, i did some idiotic things too. i’m still surprised i made it to adulthood. i thank God i made it past those times.
In the 70’s, we used match heads pressed into a copper pipe. My friend was closing off one end of the pipe in his garage when it went off. Shot clean through the garage wall. We told him he was an idiot. He had been closing off the one end by banging it with a hammer.
“You mess with the bull, you get the horns. I used to have a clever hand signal that goes with that expression, but ... ah ... I don’t use it anymore ... because ... well, I just don’t use it.”
Stick to Tannerite, kids. Legal and much safer.
It took him a year and a half of grafts and therapy to regain partial use of his hand. A tough lesson.
I did much more than that both as a kid and a teenager...
I count myself thankful that I didn’t injure myself seriously.
Kids do stupid and risky things. Some don’t make it through intact or at all. They are just being kids, and some are unlucky.
I saw Daffy Duck do that once. We had some kids in our neighborhood make some pretty awesome potato guns.
Didn’t Joe Kennedy (RFK’s son, former MA Congressmen)
nearly blow off his kids’ fingers with some fireworks once?
(ah, the wonders of search:
>>The five-term congressman, the eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy, had been regarded until last spring as all-but unbeatable in next year’s gubernatorial election. But messy publicity about the annulment of his first marriage, the alleged affair of his brother Michael with a teen-age babysitter and stories of his playing with illegal fireworks that burned his 16-year-old son have combined this year to smudge the image of the heir apparent to the Kennedy dynasty.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V117/N38/kennedy.38w.html
The lucky ones are the ones whose parents drop them 50-ft off a tower. That sets the stage for a life of successful risk-taking.
Police had been called to the same part of town, just steps from the Lynn line, on Saturday for a report of a loud explosion.
Lynn, Lynn
City of Sin
You never come back the
Same as you went in
So did I. I emptied the powder out into a mound and struck a match to it. Being a little girl at the time my reflexes and knowledge on gunpowder were zero. OUCH!!! is an understatement. But, I stopped using a match to ignite it. lol
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