Police in California on Monday detonated two devices suspected of being bombs, one found at the front door of a branch office of discount brokerage Charles Schwab and the other near a home owned by the company's founder, the Monterey County Sheriff's office said. "There was a variety of circuit boards and wires and telephone parts," the sheriff said. There were two propane canisters in one device and a single canister in the device near the residence. "While they contained what appeared to be dangerous contents, from what we can tell at this point they were a hoax, albeit a frightening one," Schwab spokesman Glen Mathison said Tuesday,
| Trying to scare him to death, were they? |
"They were serious devices," Monterey County Sheriff Mike Kanalakis said on Tuesday. "If someone had tampered with it and set off the propane canisters, it could have killed or injured somebody."
| Then they weren't just trying to scare them. |
On Monday, a briefcase with protruding wires was found at the home of Charles Schwab in Pebble Beach, Calif., according to the sheriff's office. Earlier in the day, a similar briefcase was found at a Schwab office in nearby Carmel. A bomb squad used a robot and a portable X-ray machine to inspect the briefcases. "The X-ray revealed the contents of the briefcases contained items consistent with a bomb," according to the Sheriff's office. Both briefcases were reported by employees arriving to work, Kanalakis said. He said Schwab wasn't at his home Monday. Last week, the San Francisco-based brokerage said in a regulatory filing that it plans to cut another 250 jobs before the end of the year and shut about 20 branch offices.
| There's the motive. It's probably amateur terrorism, though Schwab would be a nice symbolic candidate for a Qaeda boom... |
"We still don't have a motive for this," said Sheriff Kanalakis. "But we do have access to some surveillance tapes. Pebble Beach is a gated community and we're going to be looking at the security cameras there and there was also a security camera at Mr. Schwab's residence, so we'll be looking at all of that and hopefully we'll be able to come up with something."
| Pebble Beach is one of the most exclusive communities in the country. It costs an arm and a leg and a testicle to live there and the movements of common folk — those with only a million or two — are closely monitored. The perp will be on tape, and I'll bet he doesn't have a turban. |
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