(Sgt. Mike Curry, NYPD bomb squad, post-inc report, taken in the intensive care wing of St. Roosevelt hospital)
My partner Sgt. Lowe and I were called to 345 West 21st Street at 9:45 am the day of August 25th, 2004. Center had gotten an anonymous tip, stating that there was a bomb on the fourteenth floor, no other details, call sounded like a keeper. Building was an office tower, recently built, many floors still finishing up.
Upon arrival, some guys from the 52nd took care of the perimeter stuff. There was an EMR crew there from St. Roosevelt's, they had gotten a weird call, someone declining to state their name, a guy injured, internal wounds, 14th floor. We started to think the whole thing was a joke, but we went up to 14 anyways. Sgt. Lowe and I went in first, standard checks.
The surviving EMR guy's report will probably describe some of what we found a bit better.
14 was one of the floors still under construction. There was a man, thirties, white, short brown hair, beard, naked. He was lying on a plastic sheet in the middle of the unfinished concrete floor. His limbs were fastened down by heavy plastic netting, driven down into the concrete by some kind of nailgun. His belly was slit open... his whole torso. There was some blood around him, but not too much. He was unconscious.
There was a computer tower, no monitor, in a tangle of wires near him. Some of the wires lead up to his torso. The EMR guys went over to him, but drew back, pointing out his torso to us. Something large and metallic was implanted in him.
There was a bunch of writing on the wall, neat looking, like the guy took his time, but we were too interested in the metal pod inside the guy on the floor to look at it too much. A bunch of symbols.
The EMR guys looked him over, without touching the device, and found that he wasn't bleeding too badly. Whoever had cut him had done it very neatly. We told the EMR guys to back off for a bit.
The device... we didn't have much chance to examine it. It was a steel casing, about 8 inches long, roughly oval in shape, nestled in amongst the guy's organs. Very percisely tooled, I would almost guess it was machined on a CAM or at least a very sophisticated milling machine. Sniffer picked up traces of ammonia and lithium accelerant compounds, very sophisticated military grade. We had only read about this stuff, I'd never dealt with it even in training. We immediately called the precinct boys downstairs, to tell them to widen the evacuation area as much as possible.
There were about 40 or so wires, teflon shielded, coming out of the front of the device, through some sort of port. Again, custom machined, didn't look like anything off-the-shelf. About 1/3 of them ran up the guys chest, where they ended in electrodes, flat 1-inch copper disks, which were pasted on to the guy's head and neck. The rest of the wires ran around to the back of the computer nearby.
Looking at the back of the computer, we found a fastfiber connection running into a nearby wall. Sgt. Lowe and I decided that I would go find the building's geeks and warn them not to do anything to the building's net connection, while he would set up a standard scan package. The last thing I noticed before heading down to the basement was the small cam nestled among the cables by the computer, pointed at the man's body.
One of the EMR guys tagged along, to get some stuff from their rig. He got off on 1, exited the building.
I was getting out of the elevator, basement level, when the bomb must have gone off. That lithium accelerant... one of the guys that rescued me said that I was lucky, because the explosion fused together the concrete over my head, protecting me from the brunt of the explosion.
I hope my c-cam imaged all the stuff that was on the walls in that room. I want to know
(sic, report ends here. transcriber's note: Sgt. Curry unwilling to continue debriefing.)
(Addendum: Sgt. Curry was pulled from the rubble 14 hours after the blast; further reports to follow once he is released from the hospital. Sgt. Curry's c-cam chip was erased by the quasi-EMP effect of the bomb.)
