THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, June 2, 1995 TAG: 9506020577
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARA STANLEY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NEWPORT NEWS LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
A country club president's car exploded after he placed a package in the back seat then ran back to his office for forgotten keys. If he had been inside, he would have been killed.
Tony Suchy and Bill Heath, special agents with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, were on the case Thursday. They began by picking through the rubble of the Hyundai, now a four-door blue shell.
While the scenario was made up by instructors for a special crime-scene investigation class, the explosion was real.
Instructors blew up the Hyundai and four other cars so 25 police and fire investigators, mostly from Hampton Roads, could learn the latest forensic techniques.
The Hyundai's windshield was blown 50 feet, its roof was a misshapen dome and the interior smelled of gasoline.
``We're looking for two things,'' Suchy said. ``One is debris from the car. The second thing we're looking for is something considered foreign to the scene.''
They moved the car, exposing a smokey ditch caused by the bomb. Inside there were blackened pieces of metal, plastic and glass, probably parts of the car, Suchy and Heath said. But there were also small, plastic red pellets - possibly parts of the bomb.
``Don't overlook the obvious,'' Suchy said.
``If this were real and you had an attempted murder, I'd want to go real slow. I'd want to take a couple of days with it,'' Heath said.
Four other teams of four and five officers also examined their own bombed-out cars. Some required an available Newport News firetruck equipped with a hydraulic cutting tool and a jack to open doors and to examine the ground underneath the cars.
Others students, wearing surgical gloves, had to handle fake body parts.
``This is the first seminar we've put on locally,'' said Fred Champ, a Newport News Fire Department bomb technician and instructor. ``We've had such a demand'' for this type of knowledge, he said.
Champ said the three-day course, held at the Newport News City Farm and sponsored by the state police and other police agencies, was planned before the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19.
``There are about 1,600 manuals available on the market on how to make explosive devices,'' said Ronald Doran, an instructor at the Hampton Roads Academy of Criminal Justice on the Peninsula and a bomb technician for the York County Sheriff's Department.
Pointing to one of the cars, Doran, also a seminar instructor, said, ``If they look carefully around the wheel, they will find a clothespin.'' When the car moved, he explained, the clothespin closed, connected a circuit and set off the explosion.
``That's all it took - a clothespin,'' Doran said. by CNB