THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 19, 1997 TAG: 9701190086
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 55 lines
Police evacuated businesses and blocked traffic on East Little Creek Road for three hours Saturday after a suspicious package was found near the abortion clinic once targeted by anti-abortion gunman John C. Salvi III.
In the end, however, state bomb experts concluded that the shoebox-sized package harbored nothing but old typewriter parts.
``Better safe than sorry,'' said Jack Goldhorn, a spokesman for Norfolk's fire and paramedic services.
A security guard at the Bel-Aire Building, at 1600 E. Little Creek Road, discovered the package in an outdoor trash can about 7 a.m. during routine rounds, Goldhorn said.
The find came just hours before anti-abortion activists were scheduled to picket the Hillcrest Clinic, located inside the Bel-Aire, to protest the 24th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision legalizing abortion.
It also came only days after two bombs damaged a building containing an abortion clinic in Atlanta on Thursday. The second of those blasts injured six people who had rushed to the scene of the first explosion.
The Hillcrest Clinic drew national attention two years ago when Salvi, a young man from Massachusetts, opened fire on the clinic with a semiautomatic rifle.
No one was injured in the incident on New Year's Eve 1994, but plenty were shaken. Salvi was arrested and later convicted of killing two workers at a Massachusetts clinic, which he had attacked the day before he drove to Norfolk.
Salvi died in prison Nov. 29 of an apparent suicide.
As a precaution Saturday morning, police ordered customers and employees to leave several restaurants and a gas station near the Bel-Aire, and cordoned off East Little Creek Road from Caribou Avenue to Meadow Creek Road, Goldhorn said.
Ken Lockhart, who owns the nearby Bel-Aire Pancake House, said there have been plenty of police calls to the area because of frequent anti-abortion protests outside Hillcrest Clinic, but he never has been asked to evacuate.
``We just shut everything down and left,'' Lockhart said. ``It put me in a real bind, too, because when I needed my employees about two hours later, I couldn't find them.''
He said just one customer, an elderly woman who frequents his restaurant, was eating breakfast at the time police arrived. She finished her meal before leaving, Lockhart said.
The state police bomb squad, after some careful preparation, X-rayed the package and found all sorts of twisted metal inside. Finally at about 10 a.m., the package was deemed safe to open, and East Little Creek Road was returned to its normal routine. ILLUSTRATION: JOHN C. BELL photo
A member of the State Police bomb squad leaves the Hillcrest Clinic
on Little Creek Road after X-raying the suspicious-looking shoebox
that was found in front of the clinic Saturday morning.