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Tuesday, September 10, 2002

By Jan Ackerman and Steve Levin, Post-Gazette Staff Writers

Yesterday afternoon, Janice Friedman decided to close her maternity store in the Buhl Building on Fifth Avenue, Downtown, and go out for a while.

	Related article: City security, awareness beefed up since 9/11

But when she tried to return, she found that the avenue was closed and a policeman was standing in the middle of the road, stopping pedestrians and traffic.

"This is all because of Sept. 11," said Friedman, resigned to a day of inconvenience.

Downtown was in gridlock yesterday after witnesses told police that a young, dark-haired man with tan or olive skin dropped a suspicious-looking duffel bag near a trash basket on Liberty Avenue near Dominion Tower at about 2:40 p.m.

Fearing that the bag contained a bomb, city police diverted pedestrians, cars and buses and blocked off much of Downtown, from Fifth and Liberty to beyond Seventh Avenue and Liberty, for more than two hours while city bomb squad officers, dressed in protective suits, examined the package.

No bomb or explosives were found. Police found a two-way radio, a bathrobe that might have come from a hotel, some notebooks and miniature airline-sized bottles of liquor, said city police Cmdr. RaShall Brackney, head of the special deployment division.

It was the second such incident in less than a day in the region. On Sunday night, a suspicious-looking cooler was spotted near the temporary memorial site for United Airlines Flight 93 in Somerset County.

After evacuating the area, authorities found the cooler contained a radiation detection device stolen from a Three Mile Island monitoring station, two radon detection canisters and two plastic containers of water. Authorities said the materials contained no radioactivity and posed no danger, but they were continuing to investigate.

While the duffel bag that was found Downtown yesterday turned out to be harmless, it created some real anxiety, two days before the anniversary of the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon and the crash of Flight 93.

Kristin Nejak of Oakdale, who works in the high-rise PNC Building on Liberty Avenue, said she and two colleagues left when they realized what was going on.

"We refuse to take any chances since Sept. 11," said Nejak, who was sitting on a park bench in Two PNC Plaza waiting for police to clear the area. "Our windows face Liberty Avenue. We saw it on the street and saw that the street was blocked off."

For a while, parts of Downtown had an eerie feeling as helicopters flew overhead and city emergency vehicles wheeled around emptied streets.

Brackney said police would continue to investigate the contents of the duffel bag, which was dark olive and orange and large enough to serve as an overnight bag.

By 4:45 p.m., Penn, Liberty and Fifth avenues were reopened and city police took the duffel bag to the city crime lab, where experts would try to lift some fingerprints, find its owner and find out why it was left on the street.

Brackney said witnesses described the man who left the bag as about 5-foot-4 with dark hair and tan or olive skin. When asked if he was Middle Eastern, she said she couldn't begin to identify his ethnicity.

Brackney said a mobile crime unit initially used a special X-ray machine to examine the bag.

"The reason it looked suspicious was because of the radio and small bottles," she said.

The cooler that disrupted things in Shanksville was found about 9 p.m. Sunday by a visitor at the memorial site, which overlooks the reclaimed strip mine where hijacked Flight 93 crashed Sept. 11, killing the 40 passengers and crew. Tomorrow, President Bush is expected to meet with family members of the victims at the crash site.

The memorial site was evacuated yesterday morning while a hazardous materials team from the Somerset Volunteer Fire Department removed the cooler, large enough to hold 24 12-ounce cans.

A spokesman for AmerGen, the energy company that owns and operates Three Mile Island Unit 1, said two radiation detection devices, or dosimeters, were stolen from an environmental monitoring station near the Three Mile Island Visitor Center property.

AmerGen operates about 90 environmental monitoring stations within a 20-mile radius of Three Mile Island Unit 1 to check for radiation.

A spokesman with the state Department of Environmental Protection said the charcoal-filled radon canisters were similar to those used in homes to detect radon.

Yet another incident occurred last night, when police and city bomb squad units responded to a home in the 2800 block of Homehurst Avenue in Overbrook after a resident reported a suspicious package on her porch.

Sgt. Reyne Kacsuta said the package turned out to out be books that were mailed to the home.

Staff writer Nate Guidry contributed to this report.