Last summer’s downtown bomb threat remains unsolved

An unidentified caller likely used a public livestream to make terroristic threats. Neither Laramie Police nor the FBI have identified a suspect or made an arrest. LPD now considers the case closed.

Whoever made the bomb threat in Laramie last summer is likely getting away with it.

On June 21, amid Laramie’s annual PrideFest events, emergency responders evacuated the 200 block of South Second Street. A robust collection of law enforcement agencies and other emergency personnel arrived on scene, working to rule out the presence of any local danger.

“We received a phone call from an unidentified caller reporting that he wanted to shoot people downtown and had a pressure cooker bomb strategically placed in the downtown area,” said Steve Morgan, a spokesperson for the Laramie Police Department. “One of our bomb technicians approached a suspicious backpack, which had backpack-type items in it. It was not hazardous. The scene was identified as being secure. We followed up with the FBI and several search warrants, which were ineffective in determining the name or location of the caller.”

Nine months later, Morgan said LPD has exhausted all leads. There are no current suspects, there have been no arrests and the police now say the case is closed.

“Nobody is working on it,” Morgan said. “They’re concentrating on cases that have evidence or leads that can result in arrest or closures.”

According to the police, an unidentified male called in the threat just after 5 p.m. He was likely using an online public livestream to describe elements of the scene and make it appear as if he was actually in the area. The camera for that livestream is pointed at the intersection of Ivinson and Second Streets, showing the Crowbar & Grill and some other nearby businesses.

The caller claimed he had planted a pressure cooker bomb — the same kind of device used during the Boston Marathon attack in 2013 — in a specific vehicle in front of Crowbar.

“Officers responded and secured the area, evacuating several businesses and residences,” states an LPD news release published the following day. “Laramie Police Department Bomb Technicians responded and cleared the suspected vehicle, finding no evidence of any threats. The vehicle which was alleged to have the explosive device was not related to the suspect in any way.”

There was no definitive link between the bomb threat and ongoing Pride Month events (even though one such event was taking place at the same time, just a few blocks from the scene), but police did consider a possible connection during and after the event.

The person making the threats called several times, but eventually hung up and stopped calling.

The police soon came to believe the caller was attempting to “swat” the area — a kind of criminal harassment in which someone reports false information with the goal of raining down a large, heavily-armed law enforcement response on unsuspecting civilians or to disrupt businesses or events.

If such an individual is good at convincing law enforcement the threat is real or good at masking his actual location, there is little LPD or even the FBI can do, Morgan said.

“Criminals are getting trickier every day and our understanding and ability to track down and bring people to justice gets trickier every day too,” he said.

With no path to justice in this particular instance, Morgan said he recognizes it could happen again.

“It could repeat itself,” he said. “The same person could do it. He probably has friends that do similar things. I think I would say we are better prepared from the lessons we learned from this particular event. We know better questions to ask and better things to observe to determine if the person is who they say, what they say and where they say.”

Immediately following the incident last June, some evacuees said the heavily-armed law enforcement response was more frightening than the threat itself. 

Others complained about the communication they had or didn’t have with law enforcement. Most people in the vicinity received a Red Alert, similar to an Amber Alert, on their phones when the incident kicked off. That alert told people to steer clear of Second Street. But they never got an “all-clear” message.

Morgan said the police used geofencing to send out the Red Alert, limiting who got the message.

“We draw a circle on the map and we say we want this message to go to all the people in this circle,” Morgan said. “They get the message and they evacuate — they leave the circle. There’s no way to figure out where they are to follow up with a message to say, ‘It’s okay to go back.’”

LPD could send an “all-clear” message to those in the same circle, but that message would only go to those who ignored the earlier evacuation alert. Morgan said LPD never sent such a message. The police also could have sent a countywide message, which would have almost certainly hit everyone who had been made to evacuate earlier.

“But what that would also do is send the ‘all-clear’ to people who never got a message to begin with and you would create more chaos,” Morgan said. “We give it our best effort. We don’t just randomly send out the alerts, or randomly send out ‘all-clears.’ We give it a lot of thought. And it’s kind of like triage. You’re trying to give the most benefit to the most number of people the fastest.”

If new information comes to light, LPD or FBI could still make an arrest, but they are no longer devoting time or resources to solving the case.