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Swampscott boy, 13, hurt by homemade bomb
Salem (MA) News ^ | 05/02/08 | Bruno Matarazzo Jr

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.


TOPICS: Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: bomb; stupidkid; swampscott
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To: tacticalogic
If you liked that, you’d have loved the motorcycle carbeurator duct-taped to a leaf blower experiment.

Flamethrower? Cool!

61 posted on 05/02/2008 12:29:23 PM PDT by MarineBrat (My wife and I took an AIDS vaccination that the Church offers.)
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To: Technogeeb

We still have some old brochures from USDA on how
to make explosives from diesel and ammonia nitrate..

My uncle and granddad cleared many acres of stumps
back in the 50`s and 60`s with that stuff

They said they were always kinda scared of that stuff.

Think you need to be scared to stay “safe” using explosives.

Farm kids today are still quite adventurous let me say


62 posted on 05/02/2008 12:47:13 PM PDT by Harold Shea
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To: Lady Heron

I’d say that cleaning supplies got added... I sort of did that myself as a kid. Once, my siblings and I decided to see if we could blow the top off a film canister that was filled with baking soda and vinegar (the baking soda was wrapped in a little tissue paper to give us time to put the cap on), and we discovered that certain things like bug spray made the reaction more violent... we ended up with foamy stuff all over the porch ceiling, a tiny dent in said ceiling, and a warning from my dad that went something like “don’t do that indoors again, OK? Messy experiments stay outside”.

We were also constantly trying to burn things, fortunately without much success, and when we were older knives got added to our repertoire. Another memorable moment involved my mom warning me not to cut myself with my knife, and I didn’t - I instead accidentally cut myself with the marshmallow stick I was making (which pretty much sums up my accident-prone nature, in that I’m good with dangerous things but likely to be killed by mundane things).


63 posted on 05/02/2008 1:29:18 PM PDT by Hyzenthlay (I aim to misbehave.)
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To: Joe 6-pack
Quality control my son, follow the ASME Pressure Vessel Code, and ANSI B31. Though I have had retroactive bad dreams about when I was making nitro in my Chem class while I was doing extra Credit unsupervised.

Think of it like this: We all do stupid things when we are kids, those of us that survive those stupid things, don't repeat them and we teach our kids not to do the stupid things that we did.

This is why fathers are important to sons, boys want to do stupid things that can get them killed, girls want to be mommies and grow up and vote for Bubba, for the children.

If you kick a boy in the @ss enough, aversion therapy, He will go off and do something just as stupid as we did, something we never though of.

64 posted on 05/02/2008 1:33:33 PM PDT by Little Bill (Welcome to the Newly Socialist State of New Hampshire)
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To: Joe 6-pack
Angle of impact and a few other things have some implications.
65 posted on 05/02/2008 1:40:13 PM PDT by Little Bill (Welcome to the Newly Socialist State of New Hampshire)
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To: Little Bill
"Angle of impact and a few other things have some implications."

They certainly do. When I was at Ft. Riley, our Battalion Commander had a training (inert) HEAT round that had been recovered from the impact area. It was in generally very good shape except that the nose tube had been bent severely. He had it mounted so that the bent portion angled down, resembling a droopy male organ. It was then painted yellow and identified as the "LD" award. At our monthly officer calls, the award would be bestowed upon the officer in the battalion that had screwed up the worst in the preceding month. There were many implications to winning the LD award!

66 posted on 05/02/2008 1:50:54 PM PDT by Joe 6-pack (Que me amat, amet et canem meum)
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To: Joe 6-pack

On my last tour in VN I was a grunt in an AC unit, the trackies said that if you got a hit less or greater than 30 degrees you just got a splash, this is from an RPG. They said that if you move and groove, the chances of getting dead were small.


67 posted on 05/02/2008 2:23:46 PM PDT by Little Bill (Welcome to the Newly Socialist State of New Hampshire)
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To: Little Bill
Ever do potato mortars?

I plead the 5th amendment

68 posted on 05/02/2008 9:07:15 PM PDT by from occupied ga (Your most dangerous enemy is your own government,)
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To: ClearCase_guy

Or buy them “Jackass” and really give em something to aim for...:)


69 posted on 05/02/2008 9:13:18 PM PDT by rlmorel (Clinging bitterly to Guns and God in Massachusetts...:)
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