Well, the great Portsmouth, New Hampshire Bus Bomb Scare is over, the dust is settled, the details have come out, and — guess what? — it was much ado about nothing.
Here’s what went down, as of the latest news.
A Greyhound bus left Bangor, Maine for New York City, making many and sundry stops along the way. In Portsmouth, one passenger heard another passenger — a black man wearing camouflage pants — speaking into a cell phone and thought the guy with the phone say something about a bomb on the bus. So they used their own cell phone to call the police.
When police arrived, the driver fled the bus with the keys, immobilizing it. Then police surrounded the bus, evacuated the area, and began slowly getting everyone off the bus.
Two passengers made asses of themselves. One guy, Calvin Segar of Brooklyn, gave the police two different fake names after leaving the bus. He thought he was their target, as he suspected he might have some outstanding warrants. He also refused to give his fingerprints. That quickly became irrelevant, as they busted him for “obstructing government administration” and is being held on $7,500 bail.
Another passenger, John Smolens of Lewiston, Maine, got a bit belligerent with the police as he left the bus. He was tossed in the clink after refusing to give his name, struggling with the police, and impeding the electric current of a Taser (two charges). He was released on $2,500 bond personal recognizance.
But back to the alleged bomber (whose name is not being released). It turns out that one of the passengers was from Burundi, and didn’t speak English. Apparently, the phrase “Nothin’, just chillin’ and rollin’ through New Hampshire, which is the most awesomest place in the universe,” when spoken in Swahili sounds a bit like “I have a bomb.” The passenger had no idea what was going on, but was seriously freaked by the whole drama.
Eventually, police brought in authorities from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI. They managed to get a relative of the guy down to Portsmouth to talk to him, tell him what was going on, and persuade him to get off the bus.
Once it was established that the guy didn’t have a bomb, didn’t say he had a bomb, and had not the slightest idea why all those guy with guns were looking at him so intensely, he was released.
That’s it for the facts. Now for my own theories.
The initial reports of a white man being detained would seem to refer to Mr. Smolens, who at 68 really ought to know better than to be a pain in the ass to police when they’re dealing with a potential emergency.
The attention Mr. Segar received was most likely the product of several factors. First up, the initial reports said the would-be bomber was a black man, and Mr. Segar was black. Next, he was carrying almost $3,000 in cash on him. Then he gave conflicting stories and names and identities.
Finally, the unnamed Burundian. The story doesn’t spell out that he is a political refugee, but the conclusion is hard to avoid — here in the country legally, from a country that was the site of a massive civil war (it had a bit of the Tutsi-Hutu conflict that led to genocide throughout central Africa, most prominently in Rwanda) living in a part of Maine that has a lot of political refugees from Africa, and doesn’t speak English. I feel sorry for the guy — he did nothing wrong, and still got caught up in a huge mess. I’m glad he was released, and that his name wasn’t.
But it does reaffirm a belief of mine: if you’re going to spend a bit of time in another country, you should make the effort to learn at least a few key phrases in the language of that country. The incident probably would still have occurred, but had he been able to understand the police, it would have resolved itself a lot quicker.
Finally, I made one error in an earlier piece. I referred to a Massachusetts guy with a fake bomb taking hostages in Hillary Clinton’s campaign office in 2008. I said it was in Portsmouth, like this incident; it actually was in Rochester. In my defense, I tend to lump “the Seacoast” into one area, and haven’t spent much time over that way.
Coincidentally, the guy who did that — Leland Eisenberg — had been out on parole, with a monitoring ankle bracelet. Recently, he cut it off and went on a drunken bender. He’s going back to prison.
