About 100 people were evacuated and traffic on two busy San Francisco thoroughfares was rerouted Monday as police disabled a homemade bomb in the restroom of a Starbucks coffee shop.
An employee saw what appeared to be a suspicious device on the floor of the unisex bathroom at the Starbucks at Van Ness Avenue and Bush Street around 1:15 p.m. and called police, Sgt. Neville Gittens said.
Gittens would not describe the bomb or its size other than to say it "would have caused damage if it exploded.''
Don Henschke, sales manager at Ellis Brooks Auto Center across the street from the coffeehouse, said a police officer described the bomb to him as "a portion of a flashlight and a fuse."
Mamoru Ogawa said police called the device a pipe bomb as they evacuated him, his wife and two customers from the sushi restaurant that he owns next door to the building that houses the Starbucks.
The bomb squad disabled the device at about 2:10 p.m., and witnesses said they heard a popping sound at the time.
Gittens said no one phoned in a bomb threat or took responsibility for the device, but he said investigators have a "pretty good lead" on a suspect.
Traffic on Van Ness between Sutter and Pine streets, and on Bush between Franklin and Polk streets was rerouted from about 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. People were evacuated from the Starbucks, a seven-story apartment building above the coffee house and Ogawa's restaurant.
Vandals have targeted San Francisco Starbucks in the past.
NOT!!!!
San Francisco authorities struggled to explain Thursday how they concluded that an object left in a Starbucks bathroom was a bomb, when tests revealed it was nothing more than a flashlight with corroded batteries.
"This appeared, by itself, to be a bomb,'' said police spokesman Sgt. Neville Gittens, who was the first to relay word from bomb squad investigators Monday afternoon that the object was an "improvised explosive device." The news quickly went national, and at one point CNN was broadcasting developments.
Gittens would not specify what about the device was so convincing, other than to say that all the people who saw it described it as a "tube-shaped cylinder with a fuse.''
The incident began when an employee of the Starbucks at 1401 Van Ness Ave. spotted the object in the bathroom after a man came in, asked for coffee grounds and then used the restroom.
The employee called police. Officers evacuated the store and an apartment building above it, and bomb squad officers used a high-power hose to blast the object with water.
On Wednesday, the residue from the device was sent to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for testing. The results showed that the device was harmless, authorities acknowledged Thursday.
Gittens defended the department's handling of the matter, saying that in the post-Sept. 11 world, police are inclined to err on the side of caution.
"This was done in the interest of public safety," Gittens said. "If we had a similar situation tomorrow, we would take the same actions. I think the public would expect us to.''
He would not confirm that the device was simply a flashlight. But authorities speaking on condition of anonymity confirmed that was the case.
They said a muffled noise that police heard when the water cannon hit the object, which they took to be an explosion, may have been the sound of a chemical reaction between the water and the corroded batteries.
Local officials with the ATF would not say anything about the case Thursday other than that they had completed testing and forwarded the results to investigators.
The man who says he left the flashlight in the Starbucks, Ronald Schouten, 44, remains in custody in County Jail on unrelated matters. He told police he had found the flashlight on the street and thought it could be used for self-defense, but decided to leave it behind after using the restroom.
He was charged Thursday with burglary and is expected to be back in court today. After visiting the Starbucks, he allegedly went to a Circuit City and used the bag the coffeehouse gave him for the coffee grounds to shoplift a camera, prosecutors said.
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And then on Valentine's Day, I decided to take the 15 bus instead of my usual 45 straight to work. This led me through a street being blocked off by the SF Bomb Squad, with one of their SWAT-like black trucks hurtling toward our bus:
Briefcase Brings Bomb Squad To S.F. Chinatown
(BCN) SAN FRANCISCO San Francisco police have determined that a suspicious package found Wednesday near Portsmouth Square in Chinatown was only a briefcase carelessly left behind.
The department's bomb squad was called to the intersection of Kearny and Clay streets around 12:45 p.m., according to police.
They took an X-ray of the briefcase and determined it posed no threat.
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