By Danny Valentine and Shelley Rossetter, Times Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
The first floor of Bayshore Pointe Nursing and Rehab Center on Gandy Boulevard has been evacuated this morning while police investigate a suspicious device.
TAMPA — The pipe bomb that forced the evacuation of most of Bayshore Pointe Nursing and Rehab Center on Gandy Boulevard on Wednesday morning was a fake, police determined hours later.
"It had all the elements of a pipe bomb including a power supply," said Laura McElroy, a spokeswoman for the Tampa Police Department. "It was built by somebody very familiar with pipe bombs and it took an X-ray to determine it was not real."
A maintenance manager found a suspicious package in the maintenance office on the third floor of the building, and an administrator carried it to the first floor of the nursing home at 3117 W Gandy Blvd. before calling police, McElroy said.
The bomb squad arrived shortly after the call came in at 9:13 a.m.
Police evacuated everyone except for about 50 people on the second and third floors of the west wing for about two hours.
All residents had returned by about 12:30 p.m.
Authorities described the bomb as three pipes strapped together.
The bomb squad searched for more bombs but found nothing by noon. The device was placed into a containment chamber and was taken to another location for disarming, McElroy said.
Police have leads on a possible suspect, she said. The building is now considered a crime scene.
Authorities closed off a small stretch of Gandy Boulevard west of MacDill Avenue so the bomb squad could retrieve the device, but the road has since been reopened.
There have been no bomb threats to the nursing home, McElroy said.
Pink Whitt, an independently-employed caretaker, was there assisting a patient when she noticed employees gathered about 9:30 a.m. She thought it was a meeting, but a short while later, the evacuation began.
She didn't know what was happening until she walked into her patient's room.
"Her bed was gone," Whitt said. "I was like — what?"
It seemed orderly, she thought. Patients weren't initially told what was going on.
"I can't believe someone would actually try to come in and harm innocent, helpless people," she said.
The evacuated residents first waited under an awning at a nearby dry cleaner as fire trucks surrounded the property.
Two elderly women were hospitalized with breathing problems after sitting out in the heat.
Residents were later moved into an air-conditioned CVS store.
Many of the evacuated resident were in wheelchairs. Some seemed confused and unable to speak. They sat inside CVS, scattered between the cash registers and photo department.
One woman, who was visiting her mother, joked that lunch would be late today. An attendant took a woman in a wheelchair to the restroom.
Nursing home employees told a St. Petersburg Times reporter not to talk to patients, and a CVS employee asked the reporter to leave the store.
About noon a parade of wheelchairs exited the store, some pushed by firefighters, and headed back into the center.
Rosalyn Franklin, whose mother stays at Bayshore Pointe, learned of the evacuations about 11:45 a.m. from a friend who also has family there. Franklin hurried over and checked the CVS and another shaded area a few blocks away.
She didn't find her mother, 86-year-old Irmina White, and later learned her mother was in the wing of the facility that was not evacuated.
By 12:30 p.m., she was taking her mother away in a white minivan.
"I was scared," she said, visibly upset.
Amy McClure's 98-year-old mother spent her first night at the center Tuesday.
McClure was on her way to visit Wednesday when she came upon the closed road. She assumed there was a car accident but noticed elderly people in wheelchairs leaving the CVS parking lot.
An officer explained there had been a bomb scare.
She found her mom at the drug store, then went back to Bayshore Pointe for an explanation. An administrator wouldn't tell her what was going on, McClure said.
That didn't sit well with McClure, who said she didn't leave with a comfortable feeling. The incident made her question the thoroughness of emergency plans and why some residents were left in a wing of the building.
"Who in the heck would target a nursing home?" she wondered.
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