A man claiming to be Brandon C. Barcus Sr., eluding arrest after being charged with reckless endangerment, contacted the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette yesterday to give his version of events that led his 9-year-old son to explode a firecracker in his hand.

Southwest Regional police have been looking for Mr. Barcus, 37, of Belle Vernon, since Tuesday, when charges of endangering the welfare of children and reckless endangerment were filed against him with a district judge.

Last Saturday, Mr. Barcus was visiting his son at his son's mother's house. The mother left to get food and Mr. Barcus briefly left the room with fireworks and a lighter on the coffee table in reach of the child. The boy started to play with the fireworks and one exploded in his hand.

Mr. Barcus didn't dispute most of the charges leveled by police, though he claims the explosive was not an M-80, as described in the police report, and must have been much smaller.

He said his son's doctor told him that the boy "would be missing fingers" had he exploded an M-80 in his hand. As it stands, the boy has a hairline fracture in his middle finger, and will not require surgery, which the doctor called "a miracle," Mr. Barcus said.

"It's all nonsense," Southwest Regional police Chief John Hartman said yesterday of Mr. Barcus' claims. "What we believe happened is that once the fuse started going, [the boy] started to release the device and that's when it went off. The doctor told us he must not have been holding it tight because, if he was, it would have blown his finger off."

He added that investigators from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission will examine the device to determine exactly what it is. When an identical device found on Mr. Barcus' coffee table was detonated by another man after the incident as a safety lesson to neighborhood kids, it "blew off the end of a fence pipe," according to the chief.

"This isn't a firecracker," Chief Hartman said. "It's a bomb."

Mr. Barcus said he cleans condemned houses for a living and had found the fireworks in the basement of a house. He had planned to dispose of the fireworks but put them in his pocket and forgot about them.

Mr. Barcus, after arriving at his son's mother's house, changed his pants and left the old pair on a coffee table, he said. The fireworks, along with "a broken lighter," he said, must have fallen out of a pocket.

The child was pretending to light the firework, Mr. Barcus said, when a small spark must have caught it. Dried out from sitting in the abandoned house, it exploded before the boy could react. He was taken first to Monongahela Valley Hospital, then transferred to Children's Hospital for treatment.

Mr. Barcus said he was not negligent, and the charges were the result of a vendetta Chief Hartman has against the Barcus family.

In 2002, Chief Hartman arrested a man for DUI, but he escaped from a district judge's office with the help of Mr. Barcus' brothers, Robert and Brian. The suspect, Mark James Lexie, turned himself in hours later, but the incident was embarrassing to Chief Hartman, Mr. Barcus said, leading him to aggressively pursue any possible cases against the Barcus family.

"I would never, ever jeopardize my son or hurt my son," Mr. Barcus said.

"It was just a freak accident, and [Chief Hartman has] blown it way out of proportion."

Chief Hartman dismissed Mr. Barcus' claim as a "baseless allegation."

"I was saving his child, that's what I was doing," Chief Hartman said.

Mr. Barcus said he would wait until Monday, when his lawyer gets back from vacation, to turn himself in. Mr. Barcus would not give the lawyer's name, saying she had advised him not to do so.

"I'm not going in there without counsel," Mr. Barcus said. "That would be stupid."