Bomb threat closes East Pyne for 6 hours

East Pyne was evacuated for six hours yesterday after an anonymous caller informed Public Safety that a bomb supposedly had been placed in Chancellor Green Cafe.

The anonymous call was made at 9:34 a.m. from the student center's campus telephone and public safety arrived on the scene at 9:38 a.m., according to Public Safety Crime Prevention Specialist Barry Weiser.

The Princeton Fire Department arrived within the hour and evacuated the entire building, Weiser said. Police with bomb-sniffing dogs searched the structure for five hours, declaring the building safe to reenter at 3:08 p.m.

"We did not clear the building immediately because we needed to decide whether the threat was a viable threat. When the fire department arrived, they decided to make that call [to evacuate the entire building]," Weiser said.

According to Weiser, the anonymous caller offered few details about the specific location of the supposed bomb. "The call could not answer any of the questions that we usually ask during a bomb threat, and so we could not verify it."

"We had to evacuate the whole building because we really did not know what part of the building the bomb would be in," Weiser added.

When Public Safety officers first arrived at Chancellor Green, they "searched for anything obvious, if anything was not where it should be," Weiser said. The fire department then arrived, along with a first-aid unit and the Princeton Borough Police. The Borough Police called the Mercer and Union county sheriff offices, which then investigated the scene with three dog teams.

"The quickest, fastest way to search in these sorts of situations is through olfactory senses, and dogs are the best with that," Weiser said. "These dogs are especially trained to detect explosives."

Police divided the building into sections and searched each floor with dog teams made up of two German Shepherds and one border collie, according to Mercer County Sheriff Jim Cipriano. The dogs searched for 20-minutes periods, between which they took 30-minute breaks.

"We searched the exits first, and then hit each floor for 20 minutes until the dogs' snouts opened up. We then searched the perimeter, all the garbage cans and especially in the Chancellor Green area," said Cipriano, who added that the dogs are passive — they sit when they smell explosives. "It was a lengthy process."

"We are sweeping everything: every nook, every cranny and every door," Public Safety Lt. Donald Reichling said.

Borough Police Lt. Charles Davall said police are investigating the incident further in an effort to determine who may be responsible for the bomb threat.

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"Detectives are going out to where we know the call came from to search for [finger]prints," he said, adding that making idle bomb threats is a "false public alarm offense" that can result in more than a year in prison.