NEW YORK (LNS)—An explosive device estimated by police to have the force of 10 to 15 sticks of TNT went off in a men’s toilet on the second floor of the New York City Police Headquarters at 6:57 p.m. June 10.
The explosion tore a hole in the wall between the men’s room and an adjacent office belonging to high-ranking police officials. Seven persons were injured, none of them seriously.
A man had called the police 15 minutes before the explosion, saying, “There is a bomb set to go off at Police Headquarters.” The building was not evacuated, and police had just begun to search the building when the bomb exploded.
No precise estimate of the property damage was given, though many windows were blown out and a few offices rendered useless by the fallen rubble. The building—an ancient structure on Centre Street in Lower Manhattan—remained in use after the explosion.
A message signed “Weatherman” was received by the media—including The New York Times, the Associated Press and Liberation News Service—the day after the bombing. It said:
“Tonight, at 7 p.m., we blew up the N.Y.C. Police Headquarters. We called in a warning before the explosion.
“The pigs in this country are our enemies. They have murdered Fred Hampton and tortured Joan Bird. They are responsible for 6 black deaths in Augusta, 4 murders in Kent State, the imprisonment of Los Siete de la Raza in San Francisco and the continual brutality against Latin and white youth on the Lower East Side. Some are named Mitchell and Agnew. Others call themselves Leary and Hogan. [New York City Police Commissioner Howard Leary and Manhattan District Attorney Frank S. Hogan] The names are different but the crimes are the same.
“The pigs try to look invulnerable, but we keep finding their weaknesses. Thousands of kids, from Berkeley to the UN Plaza, keep tearing up and ROTC buildings keep going down. Nixon invades Cambodia and hundreds of schools are shut down by strikes. Every time the pigs think they’ve stopped us, we come back a little stronger and a lot smarter. They guard their buildings and we walk right past their guards. They look for us—we get to them first. They build the Bank of Amerika, kids burn it down. They outlaw grass, we build a culture of life and music.
“The time is now. Political power grows out of a gun, a Molotov, a riot, a commune…and from the soul of the people.”
In a communique dated May 21 and made public May 24, the Weathermen had promised to strike at “a symbol or institution of American injustice” within two weeks. If this was it, the Weathermen were seven or four days late, depending on how you count it.
New York’s Deputy Police Commissioner John F. Walsh and Mayor John Lindsay emerged from a grim-faced pilgrimage to the crippled headquarters with promises of a swift vengeance.
“We will press a relentless search for the person or persons responsible for this outrage,” said Walsh. “We will not stop until we have captured them—we will pursue them to our dying day.”
Elsewhere four persons, all labeled Weathermen by FBI and local police, were arrested May 28 and 29 in Oakland, Calif. and New York City, on serious charges.
In Oakland, police arrested Robert Stover and Michael Lamm, only hours after what the police described as a robbery of chemical explosives from the Nuremberg Scientific Co. Stover and Lamm allegedly were caught fleeing police in a station wagon loaded with components of nitro-glycerine—along with radical political literature.
They are being held without bail on a slew of charges, including arson, armed robbery, transporting explosives, and felonious assault in connection with the chemical robbery and previous incidents.
The day following the California arrests, New York cops broke into a West Side apartment to arrest Lee and Patricia Wood, also identified by authorities as “Weathermen.” They were allegedly arrested on the basis of information obtained from Stover’s apartment in Oakland, and were held on a total of $150,000 bail—charged with arson, attempted murder and other crimes.