Posted on 05/02/2008 9:15:26 AM PDT by raccoonradio
SWAMPSCOTT — A middle-school student had the ends of two of his fingers blown off yesterday by a homemade bomb that went off inside his Melvin Avenue home, authorities said.
The victim's brother said rescue workers could find only one of the fingertips.
The 13-year-old victim, identified by family and neighbors as Joel Surette, was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston by ambulance.
"First, he was screaming for five minutes," said his brother, Michael, 17, "He said, 'I can't believe I blew off my fingers.'"
Joanne Schumann, who lives two houses from the Surettes, was eating dinner with her family at 5:10 p.m. She didn't hear an explosion but saw Joel come out of the home with his arm covered in blood.
"He was white as a sheet," Schumann said. "He sat down in front of his house."
Michael Surette said he called 911 when he heard the bomb his brother made go off inside their home. He said the bomb contained gunpowder from about 100 toy caps that was placed inside a cardboard container with duct tape wrapped around it.
The brother added that the tip of the middle and ring fingers were blown off, and the bone was exposed on one of them.
Police said the 13-year-old was the only one hurt in the explosion and said his injury is not life-threatening.
Police had been called to the same part of town, just steps from the Lynn line, on Saturday for a report of a loud explosion.
That explosion set off car alarms, but police could not find the person responsible.
"Investigators are determining if the same person was responsible for each explosion and the possibility of criminal charges," a press release from the Swampscott police stated.
Police treated the home as a crime scene and spent almost two hours inside collecting evidence from the house and from the garbage cans at the side of the dwelling.
At 7 p.m., Detectives James Schultz and Ted Delano walked out of the home with a number of brown paper bags and left the scene. Assisting Swampscott detectives was a trooper from the state police hazardous device unit. The Swampscott Fire Department and Action Ambulance were also at the scene.
This isn't the first time local police have dealt with the premature explosion of homemade bombs made by teenagers.
In March 2007, a Swampscott High School freshman suffered burns to his face when a bomb he made using instructions he found on the Internet went off. That bomb was made with common household products.
Why, he was just going for his Bomb Making Boy Scout Merit Badge.
>>rescue workers could find only one of the fingertips.
Ah, "Fingertips (Pt 1)". Stevie Wonder.
>>"First, he was screaming for five minutes," said his brother, Michael, 17, "He said, 'I can't believe I blew off my fingers.'"
Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!
Gee, you make a bomb, it goes off, and it blows off your fingertips. What a surprise.
>>Police had been called to the same part of town, just steps from the Lynn line, on Saturday for a report of a loud explosion..."Investigators are determining if the same person was responsible for each explosion"
I'm guessing it is.
>>Police treated the home as a crime scene
Improvised explosive device--does al Queda have a cell in Swampscott, MA?
>>This isn't the first time local police have dealt with the premature explosion of homemade bombs made by teenagers.
Yes, yes, it's a common occurance I guess! Just a typical teenage activity.
Am I being insensitive when I say that everyone making homemade bombs should have his fingers blown off or worse?
As someone on the Salem News website noted (comments) he will be reminded of his stupid move every time he goes to use his mutilated hand..
This is pretty tame stuff- I'm guessing that the "fingertips" that he lost were just chunks of skin. A painful lesson about the dangers of using "contact" explosives but he'll recover. At least he was smart enough to use cardboard- a lot of kids use steel or copper pipes.
Yeah, you’re also a jerk. Kids have been making stuff from firecrackers, caps and stuff for years. Most of them aren’t doing anything evil.
Typical teenage kid. Hopefully he won’t be maimed for life — not by the homemade fireworks, he’ll live with that, but by being charged with some crime and given a criminal record and possibly being sent to juvenile hall — for being a kid.
some teenage boys are risk-takers looking for a thrill. 20 years ago, when i was a teenager, i did some idiotic things too. i’m still surprised i made it to adulthood. i thank God i made it past those times.
In the 70’s, we used match heads pressed into a copper pipe. My friend was closing off one end of the pipe in his garage when it went off. Shot clean through the garage wall. We told him he was an idiot. He had been closing off the one end by banging it with a hammer.
“You mess with the bull, you get the horns. I used to have a clever hand signal that goes with that expression, but ... ah ... I don’t use it anymore ... because ... well, I just don’t use it.”
Stick to Tannerite, kids. Legal and much safer.
It took him a year and a half of grafts and therapy to regain partial use of his hand. A tough lesson.
I did much more than that both as a kid and a teenager...
I count myself thankful that I didn’t injure myself seriously.
Kids do stupid and risky things. Some don’t make it through intact or at all. They are just being kids, and some are unlucky.
I saw Daffy Duck do that once. We had some kids in our neighborhood make some pretty awesome potato guns.
Didn’t Joe Kennedy (RFK’s son, former MA Congressmen)
nearly blow off his kids’ fingers with some fireworks once?
(ah, the wonders of search:
>>The five-term congressman, the eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy, had been regarded until last spring as all-but unbeatable in next year’s gubernatorial election. But messy publicity about the annulment of his first marriage, the alleged affair of his brother Michael with a teen-age babysitter and stories of his playing with illegal fireworks that burned his 16-year-old son have combined this year to smudge the image of the heir apparent to the Kennedy dynasty.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V117/N38/kennedy.38w.html
The lucky ones are the ones whose parents drop them 50-ft off a tower. That sets the stage for a life of successful risk-taking.
Police had been called to the same part of town, just steps from the Lynn line, on Saturday for a report of a loud explosion.
Lynn, Lynn
City of Sin
You never come back the
Same as you went in
So did I. I emptied the powder out into a mound and struck a match to it. Being a little girl at the time my reflexes and knowledge on gunpowder were zero. OUCH!!! is an understatement. But, I stopped using a match to ignite it. lol
You used to be able to mail order carbide cannons and the carbide to go with them from the back pages of comic books. Missing all or parts of fingers wasn’t all that uncommon, but the ususal cause was carelessness around tractor PTOs.
Yeah, you are.
Boys are inquisitive and love to experiment. Gave mine a chemistry set and they learned to blow things across the room and embed objects into a wall with it though I think some household cleaning supplies got added(at least that was my guess).
I am lucky that I got them raised with only 1 broken arm and 5 sets of stitches.
I heard tell of some folks that made their own ;-)
I wonder if the “caps” were the rolls of paper caps from a cap gun? Back in the 60’s when I was a kid we used to take a needle and stick it through the center of the little “dots” on a roll of caps. You stick it through one and then fold the strip like an accordian, sticking the needle through each cap successively. When you’ve done the entire roll you pull the needle out and what you have is a roll of caps where every single dot is touching each other and the gunpowder is mixed between them because of the needle-hole.
Then you find a way to bind it, such as with tape or something. Stick in a fuse and have fun. Did I mention we loved to blow stuff up when we were kids?
When I look back on some of the stuff I DID as a kid in the 60’s, it’s wonder I’m still alive. Used Cap gunpowder stuffed into bicycle spoke nuts and held over a candle till they popped. Came close to losing an eye...........
I have a 3' piece of 4" ID, 5" OD steel pipe, with a 2" solid steel plug machined for, and (carefully) welded into one end. I think it might also have a 1/8" hole drilled into the end with the plug in it, but I'd never think of making a cannon. ;-)
I used to put roll caps into a clear plastic pill bottle, cap it, and set them off with a magnifying glass in the sun.
I’ve heard some rumours about people with similar pipes making model rocket bazookas. Of course, I’d think someone doing that sort of thing would probably want to wear a motorcycle helmet with a full face shield and thick leather gloves, but of course, I’d have no way of knowing for sure.
For the ultimate fashion statement, I'd throw in a chrome leather apron.
Why did you demean the boy scouts? are you Queer?
Although those are still around (as far as I know), by the late '80s they had become obsolete to a new generation of plastic cups with a pretty nice charge in them. At Collector's Armory you can buy very realistic looking "blank firing" guns which are actually high tech cap guns. The caps are contained in brass cartridges that will actually activate the slide mechanism, eject the "cartridge" and reload, just like an actual semi-auto.
It’s sarcasm—I was wondering if he was going for his
Bomb Making Merit Badge :)
City I was born in...though I grew up in Nahant and now
live in Beverly
Swampscott’s famed residents/natives include
David Lee Roth
Lesley Stahl
Dick Jauron (Buff. Bills)
Barry Goudreau (Boston)
Johnny Pesky (not a native but lived there for years—
used to hang out at Bickford’s but left in disgust after
they banned smoking)
As a youngster I used a rock tumbler to wet-mix the ingredients for black powder. I even made my own charcoal from seasoned oak - now I know that willow would be better. The powder I made would make Goex proud. BTW, I used LONG fuses.
Genius like yours would have fit right in with my group of friends. We did everything we could think of to creatively blow stuff up. :) We were lucky kids to have a very large woods in our neighborhood. During my childhood there were always woods either behind our house or across the street. No kid should be without woods to play in.
Our pinnacle may have been the drilled out CO2 cartridge stuffed with match heads and placed in a steel pipe - which we called our bazooka! :) This was back in the day when CO2 cartridges were made of steel, and could (sometimes) withstand the pressure generated when the match heads explode.
Forty years later my friends and I still have all of our fingers. Amazing!
No just rahter gnorant. Kids have been making homemade fireworks for a long time. I seem to remember Mark Twain's description of a fourth of July being incomplete unless a screaming victim of trying to make a louder bang was hauled away bleeding.
If you liked that, you’d have loved the motorcycle carbeurator duct-taped to a leaf blower experiment.
Nope, you're just being the product of an inferior generation of humanity (no personal insult intended). You're probably completely unaware that people have legitimate reasons for making their own explosives. You probably never cleared tree stumps from a field. You probably don't know that the USDA used to actually give classes on how to use ammonium nitrate and diesel to make anfo for such purposes.
What this kid did was stupid (not the bomb making, but failing to follow safety procedures); and he'll have a reminder of it for the rest of his life. But to extend his irresponsibility to suggest that "everyone" who makes homemade bombs should suffer a similar fate would curse almost every decent farmer, engineer or scientist the United States produces to being a cripple.
In an ideal world, of course, the kid would have had adult supervision. But we've created a pitiful world where the children of milquetoast parents aren't even trusted with rimfire rifles, let alone "dangerous" knowledge like basic chemistry and physics.
Mr. Kimball;
I am still of the opinion that it is better that the bombmaker gets hurt than some innocent bystander.
By the way, you must be an arrogant jerk yourself for giving someone that title without knowing anything about him.
Sincerely,
Actually calcium carbide is not the least bit explosive, but when you add water it generates acetylene gas which is explosive when mixed with air in just about any proportion. That's where the fun comes in.
I remember the scene in the movie, The Kingdom, when they met the former Saudi bombmaker whose working in an internet cafe. Jamie Foxx goes to shake his hand, and notices some fingers missing. The bombmaker says something about his profession like, “Eventually we all swallow some of our own poison.”
I had a teenage friend who dropped rocks onto shotgun shells from the roof of his garage. Another guy used to climb telephone poles on a dare. Believe it or not, they both grew up to be screwballs.
I heard somewhere that these kids pulverized the solid rocket engines from the weaker ones (A's, B's) filled a spent CO2 cartridge with the powder, put a small piece of primer cord in it then sealed it epoxy.
They placed the cartridge in the nosecone of an Estese Alpha 3 rocket, with end of the primer going into a hole into the "parachute load" in the top of the Alpha's engine.
adjustments (to fin placement) must've been made to balance with the increased weight.
The Alpha's stabilizers were modified to fit into a length of pvc or the tube from roofing paper. A .5 V dry cell, solar igniters, breech plate and grip with a trigger were added in some manner.
Not sure what they would've have done with that thing but going on a "Goodyear Blimp Hunt" prolly wasn't it...
My niece is 13 and lives in Swampscott. I’ll bet she knows this kid. It’s not a big town.
Didn’t you leave out the Conigliaro clan? I thought they were from up there.
But of course...having played with the stuff since about the age of 5, I guess I took it for granted that was a given, but I suppose I shouldn't have.
In my mid to late teens, while still living in the northeast, I became really involved in speleology, and found a brand new use for grad-dad's lamps. I still have them somewhere, and should probably dig them out and brasso them up.
As of the late 80's, the mounting brackets on helmets for the electric headlamps then in use were still compatible with the tabs on the carbide lamps. On one caving trip I had a spectacular, space shuttle-like O-Ring failure of the rubber gasket that sealed the carbide pot from the water reservoir. A rush of acetylene shot out of the pot, and hit the flame. I thought for a moment I was witnessing the second coming.
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