The La Guardia Blast: 'My God It Was Terrible!'

Just as the new year was about to begin, just when Americans were hurrying home to celebrate, the searing instant of destruction occurred, with no warning and no explanation. It turned New York City's La Guardia Airport into a bloody ruin, killed eleven people and injured 51 others. Appalled by the act, President Gerald Ford ordered an immediate study by federal officials to try to prevent such tragedies from happening again (see box). There was immediate speculation that some terrorist group must be involved, and that what has come to seem a worldwide epidemic of political terrorism had brought its contagion to America's greatest city. But in the absence of the usual boasts by the bombers, police spent the week sifting through charred debris and ended nearly as baffled as they had been at the start. Said Lieut. Kenneth W.

O'Neil, commander of the New York police bomb squad: "If this is political activity, it has gone for naught because we have had no one authentically claim the act... So they have killed for no reason whatever."

Children's Toys. At 6:30 p.m. on Monday, the baggage area at La Guardia shared by Trans World Airlines and Delta Airlines was bustling with excitement. It was one of the busiest periods of the day--four TWA planes had landed within the past 50 minutes--and the lounge was crowded with passengers.

Through the 10-ft.-tall plate-glass windows fronting on the street they could see earlier arrivals waiting for taxis and limousines. In an area beyond stood four giant replicas of children's toys--two wooden soldiers and two peasant girls --that were part of the airport's festive Christmas decorations.

Outside the terminal, about 400 feet away, an artist named Enoch L. Stamey, 38, could see his breath in the cold night air as he waited for a limousine to take him up to Woodbridge, Conn. In the building, Edythe Bull, an energetic, 72-year-old nature lover and retired research director of Keep America Beautiful, had just missed her limousine to Wilton, Conn., where she was meeting a friend with whom she was about to embark on a trip around the world. They were looking forward eagerly to taking an elephant-ride in the Himalayan Mountains. Resigned to a wait, Miss Bull bought a limousine ticket from Edgar Cooper, 38, who was also there by chance. Normally, Cooper worked at a booth in the American Airlines section, but he was filling in here for the day.

The crowd getting ready to leave La Guardia included Ronald Presslaff, 33, who was on his way home to Long Beach, N.Y., after having attended a Christmas family reunion in Indianapolis, and Donald Kochersperger, 57, a mining engineer returning to Greenwich, Conn., after a short business trip to Milwaukee. A limousine driver named Frank Musicaro, 48, was placing a call on his tie line to Dispatcher Jeanne McDonald. "I got my Wantagh passenger," he said. "Where do you want me to go next?" She was about to answer when there was a brilliant white Light and a deafening thunderclap in the terminal. The dispatcher heard the explosion clearly over the phone. "Frankie! Frankie!" she called.

"Are you there? Are you there?"

But Frank Musicaro, Edythe Bull and all the others were dead or dying.

The explosion, which had roughly the force of 25 sticks of dynamite, tore a hole about twelve feet wide in the ceiling, which was made of a slab of concrete eight inches thick and reinforced by steel. It shattered the row of lockers and blew out 360 ft. of plate-glass windows. Driven like bullets, jagged pieces of metal and shards of glass slashed through the crowds.

Flying Glass. The effect was devastating. Pieces of bodies hurtled through the air. One elderly woman's arms were hanging by shreds of skin. A man lying on the ground kept identifying himself as a doctor and asking for help with his injured leg. To make matters worse, the fire-control sprinkler system--ripped open by the blast--drenched the victims who were lying around the baggage area. Slowly the water began to turn red with gouts of blood. One bystander, Calvin Hill, reached down to prevent a prostrate woman from drowning. "She was all torn apart," he said later. "She was dead." Several survivors remember seeing a woman's severed head resting on a ledge. "My God," said one man who escaped unhurt, "it was terrible!"

Many of the victims, like Stamey, were cut down by flying glass or metal, although they were hundreds of feet away from the site of the blast. The traffic island in the roadway outside the terminal became stained with blood. Many of the survivors went into shock. Two elderly ladies staggered unhurt from the terminal, flagged down a cab, and asked to be taken to Freeport, L.I., 16 miles away. Said the sympathetic cabby: "They cried all the way."

Lights flashing and sirens screaming, ambulances began fighting their way through the heavy traffic to reach the scene. Most of the victims were taken to Elmhurst Hospital, 2.3 miles away, where teams of surgeons worked frantically to save lives. Marine Pvt. Ricardo Sealy, who had been waiting for a flight to his base at Cherry Point, N.C., lost one foot in the explosion; the other was amputated at the hospital. Out in the hallways, bundles of bloody clothing were left lying about in the confusion. One by one, the lightly injured began reappearing in the dreary lobby, some with face wounds that had been hastily sewed up and left unbandaged. The effect of the blast was so stunning that they had trouble remembering what had happened. TWA Flight Attendant Kathy Lawrence, 20, who suffered a gash on her chin, tried to answer questions, but she had a blank stare of terror in her eyes.

Sodden Debris. Wearing orange coveralls, members of New York City's bomb squad sloshed through the bloody water in the baggage area the next day, collecting the casual detritus of such disasters: a paperback copy of James Michener's The Source, a pair of ski poles, a velvet slipper. Overhead hung a jungle of twisted pipes, electrical wires, dangling slabs of insulation. The men picked up pieces of torn metal from the lockers and painstakingly reassembled them in a nearby area. Working with FBI agents, they set up wire-mesh screens and sifted through the sodden debris, looking for evidence that might lead them to the bombers. The experts were able to reassemble the lockers well enough to be sure that the explosive had been in the second locker from the right in the middle row. But the force of the explosion was so strong that at first it appeared to have obliterated all clues. The experts were not even sure what kind of explosive was used, let alone who might have planted the bomb. "We may never put the picture together," acknowledged Bomb Squad Commander O'Neil as the work began.

To solve the mystery, the FBI assigned 300 men and the New York police 200 to the case. Initially there were rumors of involvement by violent political groups like the Palestine Liberation Organization (which quickly denied it). One group that naturally came under suspicion was the Puerto Rican Armed Forces of National Liberation (F.A.L.N.), which had claimed responsibility for exploding the bomb at historic, 18th century Fraunces Tavern in New York City on January 24, 1975, a blast that killed four and injured 53.

With so little to work on, the agents paid special attention to a telephone call made to police by a young woman about 40 minutes after the blast. She reported having overheard two men in a phone booth saying, presumably to police, that a bomb had been planted in the airport. Then, reported the police, a second, older female voice interrupted the girl and declared that they did not want to get involved. With that, the callers abruptly hung up. Studying the tapes of the conversation, language experts claimed that both women were Puerto Rican, which raised suspicion that there might be some kind of connection with the Puerto Rican terrorist group. But police also said that they had no record of any warning phone call of the kind the girl described.

Solid Clues. Conceivably the explosion could have been a mistake. A terrorist group might have planted the bomb with the intention of phoning in a warning, only to have it go off too soon. Or just as conceivably, the device could have been set by some lone madman for reasons of his own. Police began checking former airline employees who might bear a grudge against their old employers, people who have lost relatives in airline crashes, and the beneficiaries of insurance policies carried by anyone at the scene.

At week's end the investigators began to turn up some solid clues. The FBI determined that the explosive was a high-powered plastic substance usually associated with professional terrorists. The police announced that they had found pieces of a timing device and a battery. What was more, it was disclosed that a man claiming to be the head of the F.A.L.N. called the New York police to say that his organization had committed the crime. The leads were promising, but they were still only leads. As 1976 began, the FBI and the police were still trying to pin down for sure who had turned the holiday season into a tragedy for so many people.

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