City alert in threat to Bush
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BY MICHELE McPHEE and LEO STANDORA, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
The Secret Service clamped down on midtown last night to protect President Bush from a possible assassin armed with a hunting rifle.
Lawrence Ward, 59, left his upstate New York home Wednesday with a .30-30 lever-action hunting rifle in the trunk of his car, telling a neighbor, "I'm not coming back."
Inside his house in Bainbridge was a picture of Bush with the words "Dead Man" spray-painted near it, law enforcement authorities said.
Bush was in town for a fund-raiser at the Sheraton New York before speaking today at the UN General Assembly.
The Secret Service deemed Ward, a software engineer, such a "credible threat" that a three-square-block chunk of midtown was cordoned off.
Secret Service agents and city cops patrolled the area looking for anything suspicious.
Ward's ex-wife, Judith Ward, 59, who lives in Connecticut, told the Secret Service she thinks her former husband "is very dangerous and capable of killing someone and/or committing suicide."
She said Ward "is obsessed with weapons, [Oklahoma City bomber] Timothy McVeigh and the book 'The Dead Zone' - a novel about the stalking and attempted assassination of a presidential candidate," according to a Secret Service document.
The document, reviewed by the Daily News, said Ward sent his ex-wife a CD that mentions killing both Bush and Democratic rival John Kerry .
He also was said to be "obsessed" with his 19-year-old daughter, Priscilla Jane.
Judith Ward told The News she divorced her husband four years ago after 18 years of marriage because "he was a wife-beater and other things I don't want to talk about."
Authorities said Ward has a criminal past dating to 1991, including an indecent sexual proposal charge.
The neighbor in Bainbridge, a community about 40miles northeast of Binghamton, told authorities that Ward "frequently spoke of 'fighting the system' and other anti-government topics."
The neighbor said Ward gave him his house keys and told him to help himself. He then drove off in a blue 1997 Toyota sedan with the New York license plate BRF-6546.
Two days later, the neighbor went into the house, found the photo of Bush and called police.