The whole incident unfolded Sunday after Ivan White ran into his friend, he said in a phone interview.
His buddy, Lee Parker, is homeless, White said. Parker had a job interview the next day, though, so White had offered to let him stay the night at his New Jersey apartment, White said. That way Parker could get a shower, a shave, a good night’s sleep, that kind of thing.
They were watching football, and at halftime, Parker and White decided to dash out and make a quick purchase. White told The Washington Post in a phone interview Wednesday that they went to buy cigarettes. (“I guess that’s a cautionary tale,” he said. “Don’t smoke.”) Parker told other media outlets it was a beer run.
Regardless, what matters is what they discovered during that trip.
“So Lee had been saying how he needed a backpack,” White said. “All evening long, he kept saying, ‘I need a backpack, I need a backpack.'”
And as they were walking down the street, that’s what they spotted – a backpack on top of a garbage can.
“So I said to him, I say, ‘Lee! There’s a backpack,'” White said.
Lee grabbed the backpack, said White, but mentioned that it was kind of heavy. White told him to take the bag across the street, to a grassy area. Parker could figure out what was inside, while White ran into the store.
“So when I come out the store, he’s waving, ‘come here, come here, come here,'” White said. “And I come across the street, he goes, ‘What do you think this is, what do you think this is?’ So I looked inside – by this time we’re walking with the backpack, he and I together, okay? And I said ‘we need to put this down and go to the police station right now.'”
Parker asked why.
“I said, ‘because this is a bomb,'” White said. “He looked at me, he said, ‘get the hell outta here.'”
The object in the pack – which was discovered near a train station in Elizabeth, N.J. – was an explosive device. And actually, “multiple improvised explosive devices” were found. The pair’s discovery followed weekend bombings in Manhattan, an incident that left more than 20 people injured, and Seaside Park, N.J., a blast that occurred along a race route.
Authorities have accused 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami in the bombings, and linked him to the bag that Parker and White discovered. An FBI complaint notes that Rahami’s fingerprints were found on items, which include unexploded bombs and documents, in the backpack found in Elizabeth.
Rahami on Monday was apprehended and hospitalized after a police shootout. He faces several counts in connection to the attacks.
“If [Parker] didn’t need a backpack, we wouldn’t have thought twice about it,” White said. “If I hadn’t of been with him, he wouldn’t have somebody to say, ‘What do you think of what this is?'”
Parker’s account of the evening’s events has differed slightly from White’s in some reports. For example, he told the Los Angeles Times that the pair had gone to a bar for a beer. NJ.com reported that the pair were out “purchasing beer” after watching football.
Parker told NJ Advance Media that the items he and White saw looked like candles, at least initially.
NJ.com reported:
“When I went to discard the items in the backpack, it seemed odd,” Parker said. “I thought they were decorated candles, but no decorated candles have wires.”
“It was a strange item,” he said. “It was shiny.”
“It was cylinder in shape, it looked like it was wrapped in tin foil, there was wires coming out of it, it was like, three stick-looking objects behind it,” White said in the telephone interview Wednesday, describing what he saw. “And then there was a black box-looking thing, about the size of a paperback novel, that had a white label that said C-5 on it.”
White said that the pair went to the police station and alerted authorities to the bag and its contents. They went back to the location where they had left the pack, and “like four of the biggest police officers from Elizabeth walk up to the bag,” he said.
“They look inside of it, and they cautiously retreat,” White said. “Now one of them says, the sergeant says, ‘let’s tape this whole area off, nobody out, nobody in. Let’s tape the area off.’ And they said, ‘it’s a suspicious item, alright.’ I looked at them and said, ‘It’s a bomb.'”
Later that night, authorities brought Parker and White back to the taped-off area. They first spotted the bag at about 8:45 p.m., White said. Hours later, at around 12:40 a.m., they were on the scene when a robot detonated an explosive that was in the bag.
“We were behind the tape on the perimeter, but yes,” White said. “We were close enough to feel the ground shake.”
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Sarah Larimer
