Bomb Fears End Music Student’s Thesis With a Bang

When what school employees thought was a suspicious package arrived in the mail early this month at Cal State Dominguez Hills, nervous officials summoned members of the bomb squad, who proceeded to explode the package.

The package did not contain a bomb, just the remnants of sheet music and a cassette tape. Now officials have determined that the contents were the master’s thesis of graduate student Takashi Kawai.

The university is granting Kawai an extension so that he can resubmit his thesis, said Rick Gloady, director of public relations at the college near Carson.

“He obviously had the assignment in on time,” Gloady said.

Campus officials said they are unusually wary of suspicious packages after package-bomb attacks in June that injured a professor at UC San Francisco and at Yale University.

Kawai, 31, contacted Wednesday by telephone at his parents’ home in Japan, said he kept copies of the cassette tape and of the 50-page score he had mailed to the university.

He said he is unsure what could have been deemed unusual about the package, which he described as looking normal. But when it arrived at the school July 6, a campus employee decided that it looked suspicious and alerted campus security officials, who contacted the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

A sheriff’s team inspected the package and decided to detonate it in a nearby field as a precaution.

Kawai, who learned of his thesis’ fate Tuesday, said he initially feared that the incident would hurt his chances of returning to the United States this fall to continue his studies.

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Kawai had composed the music in collaboration with Juan Hernandez-Senter, an associate professor of Spanish literature at Cal State Long Beach. Hernandez-Senter had written a long poem to accompany Kawai’s music.

Hernandez-Senter said Wednesday that the taped work, titled “Fue Cosa de Un Dia (It All Happened One Day),” has been in progress for two years. He said he and Kawai are working on a new ending, and he hopes they can incorporate last week’s bomb-squad episode.

“I think it’s really a sad statement on our society that you can’t send poetry and a cassette without people thinking it’s a bomb,” said Hernandez-Senter of Los Alamitos. “I’m not blaming these people for being afraid. I know that’s the way things are.”