Suspicious Suitcase Prompts Shopping-Center Evacuation (CA)
11:33 PM PDT on Monday, May 17, 2004 The Press-Enterprise Suspicions about a suitcase left in a Murrieta shopping center led to evacuations of three stores for about three hours Monday, authorities said.
The suitcase, which later was found to be empty, was noticed at about 4 p.m. in a parking lot on Madison Avenue near Murrieta Hot Springs Road, Sgt. Bob Landwehr said. "It seemed strange that nobody had called reporting a lost suitcase," he said. "A store manager said it was sitting on a Home Depot dolly for hours."
Erring on the side of caution, he said, three nearby stores and Home Depot's garden center were closed. The parking lot also was taped off, Landwehr said. At about 7 p.m., the Riverside County sheriff's Hazardous Device Team moved the suitcase to a secure area and determined there was nothing inside, Landwehr said. The shopping center was reopened.
Remember the strange bottles of water that kept turning up in the subway tunnels?
It is either a test? or a sick joker.
You can buy used suitcases at garage sales and Goodwill type stores.
But I ran across a report in the past 2 weeks or so, about the number of thefts from the Goodwill 'drop off boxes'.
That would be handy, the suitcases would come complete with another persons finger prints already on them.
Is the day coming that we will have to wipe our prints off our trash?
All these false alarms serve 2 purposes, they get us to the point that we think that it is all a false alarm.
And they keep the Police busy on false alarms, as one of the terrorist directives suggests.
When we get careless, we will pay for it.
Either response times are being monitored, or it's some kind of diversion tactic. Thanks for the articles, I'm reading them all.
Seems to me that they are testing response and reaction.