Bomb Probes Focusing on Racial Motivation

Federal investigators are focusing on “a possible racial motivation” behind the mail bombs that killed a federal appeals judge and a black attorney, Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh said Tuesday as police defused a bomb sent to the Jacksonville, Fla., office of the NAACP.

The bombs, along with a fourth sent to the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, “represent not only vicious assaults on innocent life but constitute an attack on institutions which protect our basic freedoms,” Thornburgh said.

FBI Director William S. Sessions noted that the four bombings and attempted bombings took place in three different states--Georgia, Alabama and Florida. He said that it is “quite possible more than one” individual is behind the incidents. He would not say whether the FBI has any suspects.

In the latest incident, NAACP chapter President Willye Dennis nearly opened a shoe-box-sized mail bomb Monday night but decided that she was running late and should rush to a news conference. By Tuesday morning, Dennis had grown wary of the package and police were summoned to check it.

“If I were a preacher, I’d be leading a prayer,” said Dennis Tuesday after being told about the contents of the package by the police bomb squad.

“It was a stroke of sheer luck” that the package was not opened earlier, she added. Lloyd Pearson, treasurer of the chapter, called the escape “a miracle.”

At a Washington press conference, Sessions cited similarities in all four explosive devices but refused to specify what those similarities are.

However, other sources involved in the investigation said that FBI bomb experts have concluded that the four bombs were assembled by an expert.

“This guy didn’t learn about making bombs by going to the library,” an investigator said. “He’s real skillful. He knows what he’s doing.”

Sessions noted that the bomb targets included a judge who had ruled on civil rights cases, the NAACP and a black attorney who had represented the NAACP. Thus, he said, racial motivation “has to be one of the factors in the back of our minds.”

The series of bombings began Saturday with a nail-packed device that instantly killed Judge Robert S. Vance of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and seriously injured his wife, Helen, at their home in a Birmingham, Ala., suburb. It was followed Monday by the discovery of an unexploded parcel bomb sent through the mail to the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta.

Later Monday, Robert Robinson, a Savannah, Ga., city alderman and attorney, died after opening a nail-packed bomb sent to his office. Robinson had represented the NAACP in a desegregation suit involving Savannah schools before the 11th Circuit.

Further possible links developed Tuesday when it was learned that Judge Vance had reinstated busing for school desegregation in Jacksonville in a September opinion for the 11th Circuit. The NAACP provided lawyers in that case.

A source involved in the investigation said that the package sent to the Jacksonville NAACP was very similar to the other three bombs.

Allen P. Whitaker, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Birmingham office, displayed a package similar to the ones in which the bombs have been sent, so that the civil rights community, judges, their staffs and families might recognized any future bombs.

The package is about 5 by 7 by 12 inches and bears a red-bordered white address label with the destination and sender’s address typewritten. The packages are wrapped in brown paper, are taped on the ends with tan plastic tape and are tied with one-eighth-inch cord.

The four packages carried different postmarks, a source close to the investigation said, but he would not say whether they were mailed on the same day or if they were sent first class.

Sessions and others involved in the investigation said that they had not ruled out the possibility of Colombian drug cartels being behind the bombings. However, it was clear that the investigators are focusing primarily on a racial, anti-civil-rights motive.

“Our greatest concern is for members of the NAACP and others who have high profiles,” said Diader Rosario, a spokesman for the FBI in Atlanta. He added that investigators fear there are “other possible devices out there” that civil rights activists may receive.

“Steps have been taken to provide additional protection to members of the federal judiciary,” Thornburgh said in a statement. “In addition, I have been in contact with leaders of the civil rights movement to assure them that we are fully committed to the vigorous investigation of these crimes and the apprehension of the person or persons” who perpetrated them.

In Jacksonville, Duvall County Sheriff Jim McMillan said the device that was almost opened at the NAACP headquarters was an “anti-personnel bomb” designed to kill or maim anyone within close range.

Jacksonville Mayor Tommy Hazouri denounced the attack as a “dastardly and cowardly act of terrorism. . . . We have (terrorism) right here in America in the form of mail-order bombing.”

At the NAACP news conference, Dennis and other spokesmen sought to minimize the racial aspects of the bombings, noting that the first victim, Judge Vance, was white. “This is beyond racial matters,” Dennis said.

But the officials acknowledged that the cause for which the NAACP has been best known in Jacksonville is a lawsuit that resulted in a court-ordered plan designed to achieve “desegregation with equity for everyone.” A recent court ruling reaffirmed the plan over objections from local citizens, the officials said.

NAACP executives credited news accounts and official warnings for sparking Dennis’ second thoughts about the package sitting in her office.

“She called me this morning and said, ‘Don’t you open it,’ ” said Pearson, who was the only one working in the office Tuesday. When local and federal officials arrived to examine the package, he said, they took one look and yelled: “Get out!”

Pearson said that the bomb had arrived in a “neatly wrapped package” about 10 inches long by 7 inches wide.

He said he had not looked at the postmark but that the package bore the return address of an “attorney at law” in Warner Robins, Ga.

It was addressed to the NAACP’s legal department--a fact that should have made him suspicious, Pearson said, because the local office has no such division.

The Jacksonville NAACP office is in a somewhat shabby shopping center in the northwest part of the city. A motorcycle club, carpet repair shop and beauty shop were among the neighboring businesses evacuated for more than three hours as authorities dismantled and removed the bomb.

The Jacksonville office’s desegregation lawsuit was similar to one in Savannah in which murdered attorney Robinson had participated on behalf of the NAACP there.

But Robinson’s associates in Savannah said Tuesday that he had played only a small role in the lawsuit, despite being publicly identified as the attorney of record.

“Robbie Robinson was not a high-profile person in the civil rights effort,” a fellow city alderman, Floyd Adams Jr., said.

“I never would have thought this would happen in Savannah, and I still don’t (believe) it did,” Adams said.

Savannah Mayor John Rousakis told reporters that the bomb that killed Robinson had been similar in a number of ways to the Atlanta and Birmingham bombs.

He said that the Savannah bomb “probably (had) been mailed in Georgia” and bore a return address “that might have been familiar” to the victim.

Robinson’s Savannah law office bore the grim marks of the damage such a weapon can impose.

The ceiling and walls were scarred with hundreds of bloody holes and gouges from the nails that spewed from the bomb and ripped an arm and a leg from Robinson’s body.

The desk itself had been devastated, with a gaping rectangular hole in its top. The windows behind it were shattered.

Outside the front door, where, witnesses said, Robinson shrieked and fought in pain as he was loaded into an ambulance, a blood stain was all that remained.

Sessions, at the press conference, confirmed that the parcel bomb sent to Vance carried the Newnan, Ga., return address of Judge Lewis Morgan, a colleague on the 11th Circuit. But Sessions would not say whether the parcel actually carried a Newnan postmark.

He said that the return address showed the actual sender to be “a person familiar with the composition of the court.”

Other investigative sources have said that the fact that Morgan’s name appeared on the package could have caused Vance to open it without any concern, because Morgan had sent him packages in the past.

“It’s a degree of sophistication that shows how well thought out this was,” one source said.

Sessions said that he “would not be surprised” if the Vance bombing turns out to be linked to cases the judge decided.

Despite the use of the U.S. Postal Service to deliver the bombs, several employees in an Atlanta post office near the downtown site of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said that they have taken no special precautions to screen parcels. One carrier working downtown said that he and fellow employees find the situation “really scary.”

Staff writers Larry Green, Lee May and David Savage contributed to this article. Ronald J. Ostrow and Savage reported from Washington, Douglas Jehl from Savannah and Jacksonville, and Green from Birmingham.