Brief by Central Staff
Terrorism – June 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Salida is usually a rather quiet town in early May — the skiers have departed, and the summer tourists haven’t started arriving. But it was in the national news for a few days, starting on May 6.
That’s when Walt Iiams, a retired policeman and former city councilor, went to get his mail at 1220 I St. Inside the box, he found a capped six-inch piece of ¾ inch pipe; it was enclosed in a plastic sandwich bag with a note. Such mailbox pipe bombs had already been discovered along rural routes in Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska, and six people had been injured.
But Salida is a long way from the Midwest.
Iiams called the police, who faced a dilemma. If they left the device in the box and waited for a bomb squad from the city, then they’d have to evacuate the neighborhood. But they aren’t exactly experts at handling bombs, either. Sheriff Ron Bergmann and Police Chief Darwin Hibbs borrowed a catcher — a noose on a long stick — from the animal control truck, and got the device out of the neighborhood.
When the feds arrived — FBI and BATF — they said it resembled the pipe bombs of the Midwest, although at the time, no one was sure whether it came from the same bomber. Authorities warned residents to keep their mail boxes open, and call police if they found any suspicious objects.
As matters developed, a man was arrested on May 7 in Nevada. The suspected pipe-bomber, twenty-one-year-old Luke John Helder of the University of Wisconsin, had passed through Salida and stayed at a local motel on the night of May 5.
A couple of similar pipe bomb installations had involved clusters of eight mailboxes, which had Salidans worried. But no more have turned up, and the mailboxes in and near town are closed once again. So it was over quickly, and no one got hurt. If you have to be part of a national terrorism story, that’s a good way to have it happen.