Residents wait out word on bomb threat

Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2001 | 10:49 a.m.

Leonard Kaczka peered out his living room window as Metro Police cars pulled in front of his home off Tropicana Avenue and U.S. 95 about 6 p.m. Monday.

Then he heard the word "bomb" as officers knocked on the front door.

"I thought, 'Uh-oh, they're going to make us leave,' " Kaczka said from a picnic bench inside Woodbury Middle School at Sandhill Road and Harmon Avenue, where Leonard, his 81-year-old wheelchair-bound mother, Mary, and 60-year-old sister Joan, who was on crutches, arrived in an AMR ambulance.

The trio came to the school, set up by the Red Cross as an evacuation center for 189 residents, as law enforcement officials evacuated hundreds of people while they investigated a rented van suspected of containing explosives.

"Nothing like this has ever happened to us before this," Joan, a nurse for 30 years in Gary, Ind., hospitals, said. The family moved to Las Vegas 10 years ago to escape the winter snowstorms that had Joan and Mary freeing their car from ice sometimes 6 inches thick.

Leonard and Joan explained that their mother seldom gets out of the house.

"I want to go home, please let me go home," Mary said, as the oxygen tank by her side started running low. In March she suffered a stroke that left her alert but confined to a wheelchair. She plucked at a handmade afghan in vibrant blue, red and green that was wrapped around her legs, protecting them from the night's chill.

Around the family, children ran, played catch with rubber balls and drank Gatorade provided by the Red Cross. Some began crying loudly as the hours dragged without word from police.

Yorkshire terriers rubbed noses with poodles and cocker spaniels on leashes as their owners brought their pets to the shelter's safety. Residents arrived at Woodbury by car, Citizen Area Transit buses, and like the Kaczkas, an occasional ambulance.

Besides Woodbury, residents were sent to Chaparral High School and Whitney Library. Shelters also had been set up at three area elementary schools, but no residents used them.

Donna and Lorne Lomprey were resigned to the situation. Lorne, a retired Clark County Fire Department investigator, worked on the MGM Grand fire in November 1980, which killed 87 people, and has seen the results when tragedy strikes.

"They are only doing this for public safety," Lomprey said after hearing that McCarran International Airport had diverted flights in case of an unexpected explosion.

Linda Fitzgerald and Dick Miller of the Red Cross said they expected the incident would end by 11 p.m. But the 11 o'clock news came and went, and evacuees were still in the school's cafeteria.

One couple arrived at the school about 10:30 p.m. after going to a movie and on a shopping trip. The roadblocks were still in place when they tried to cross Sandhill at Tropicana, they said.

Shortly before midnight residents were given the all-clear to return to their homes.

The Kaczkas, who had been given a second oxygen tank, boarded an AMR ambulance for the trip.

"Are we leaving now?" Mary asked, her eyes bright but her face tired under a hand-knitted brown cap.

"Yes, we are," Joan told her, as an automatic ramp lifted her into the ambulance behind her mother, who was secured in her wheelchair.