BY TEQUILA MINSKY | It was that familiar mantra — if you see something, say something — that nagged at Jane Schreibman after she made her way back from the police barricades on Sixth Ave. and W. 25th St. on Sat., Sept. 17.
At 10 p.m. that night, Schreibman, a photographer and longtime Chelsea resident, was oblivious to the drama that was occurring just blocks south — after a bomb had exploded on W. 23rd St. an hour and a half earlier — until a friend called to ask if she all right. Schreibman went out to check out the scene. On her way back home, however, she realized that she had passed something odd on the sidewalk just doors from her building.
“It was a pot with many wires coming out of the top, sitting in front of a postal storage box,” she recounted.
When she first saw it, she thought it looked like “a kid’s science project they had thrown away.” Upon a second look, though, the phrase “If you see something suspicious, call 911” flashed in her mind. She also remembered hearing about pressure cooker bombs — like the ones that had been used in the Boston Marathon bombing — and went upstairs to her apartment and called the authorities.
“I gave the dispatcher the info and she told me, ‘This is high priority,’ ” Schreibman said, retelling the story earlier this week.
When Schreibman went back downstairs, there was a man in an olive-green state trooper uniform attending to the device.
“Run!” he told her — and she did.
Later, Schreibman found out that a neighbor a few doors down had also spotted the device and called 911.
West 27th St. is very different from W. 23rd St., with comparatively little foot traffic. Thinking about it later, Schreibman felt it was an odd location to place a device like this.
She went around the corner to hang out with friends, checking every hour or so, until police let her back into her building around 3 a.m.
On Sunday, she posted on her Facebook page: “Found a pressure cooker bomb in front of my house last night, 27th between 6th and 7th. When the bomb squad came they said ‘run off the street,’ so i did. Played Scrabble with my friend Cynthia around the corner till a detective escorted me home at 3am.”
On Monday, the calls from the media poured in — NBC, ABC national, CBS, the New York Post, the Daily News, Los Angeles Times, CNN, Fox News. “Inside Edition” interviewed her by Skype, and Curtis Sliwa did a phone interview with her.
“Were you frightened?” many asked her.
“It looked so silly, I didn’t think it was a bomb,” she said.
Another question she got a lot: “How do you feel being a hero?”
Her response: “I’m not a hero, I’m a New Yorker. Anyone would have done this.”
But, of course, that’s not entirely true. There is so much trash dotting the streets at any time that it’s hard to determine what should be reported.
“It was those wires, coming out of the top,” she recalled, of what ultimately compelled her to make the call.
The pressure cooker had duct tape on it, and was connected to an object, which Schreibman couldn’t see because it was taped-over. A video posted online shows a robot nudging the device along the street and into a containment van.
There’s no question, however, that she and the other observant citizen who called in a report should be recognized for what they did. State Senator Brad Hoylman, who represents the area, personally called to thank her for her quick-thinking action.
Schreibman is a documentary photographer. She has taken photographs in Pakistan and pre-Taliban Afghanistan — where she had bodyguards — and has traveled many times to India.
Captured on surveillance video, two men — referred to as scavengers by some media outlets and thieves by another — were spotted picking up a suitcase on the street believed to have held the device. They ultimately left the bomb on W. 27th St. but took the rolling suitcase with them. Robert Boyce, chief of detectives of the New York Police Department, said it was unclear if the pair had unknowingly deactivated the bomb when they removed it from the suitcase.
One quipster commented on Twitter: “Seriously, the only way this story could be more NYC is if the bombs were discovered by a pizza rat.”
