Bomb Scare Briefly Snarls Traffic at Majors Market
UPDATED—A backpack abandoned by a homeless person caused a bomb scare on Los Angeles and Ninth streets on Oct. 5 in downtown, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
At 8:06 a.m., police received a call about a suspicious package on the street. The police department’s bomb squad investigated the package and cordoned off the square-block area around the CMC. The streets were declared safe when the suspicious package was identified as a homeless person’s abandoned backpack, Lt. Paul Vernon said.
With concerns about terror alerts in Europe, Vernon said he received calls from around the United States requesting updates on the street corner where the California Market Center fashion showroom building is located. Vernon estimated a couple of dozen police and traffic personnel were called out to cordon off the street, control traffic and investigate the alleged bomb. “If a bomb squad is called out, they follow protocols and find out what the problem is,” Vernon said. LAPD gets five to six bomb-scare calls daily.
The bomb scare was called during the busy Los Angeles Majors Market and Taste of OffPrice show inside the California Market Center. Although traffic slowed to a crawl around the building, the scene inside was calm, if subdued, as buyers in town for the trade shows grabbed coffee and headed to the showrooms upstairs. “It slowed down traffic for 35 minutes,” said David Lapidos, vice president of the Offprice Show, which produced Taste of OffPrice. “But so many entrances to the building were open that the slowdown was not so bad.”
However, the slowdown lingered for the rest of the day. Buyer traffic at the Offprice Show was slower on Oct. 5 than the other two days of the show, Lapidos said.
A CMC spokesperson said members of the building’s services team discovered the package with a suspicious note on it outside of the CMC. They immediately notified the LAPD, which handled the situation from there.—Andrew Asch
