Tuesday, February 5, 2019, a couple of years before the completion of the State Route 132 bypass.
On the way to work passing through the north side of the downtown area, I stopped at the corner of 13th and L Streets and waited for the light to change to green. A yellow delivery truck passed through the intersection and headed in a southbound direction on 13th Street. The window on the driver’s side of the truck was rolled down but instead of seeing the head of a driver, I recoiled when I saw a mass of swirling gray smoke from which an angry face appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. This was not a vision of the divine; it was a grotesque image of evil. In that instant I somehow read the truck driver’s mind and immediately understood his intention to set off a bomb in downtown Modesto, a bomb like the one set off in Oklahoma City in 1995, so many years ago, the explosion that blew off the front of the Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 and injured over 500.
I had to make a choice. Either ignore what I saw and drive to my home a few miles away and be safe when the bomb went off, or take a gamble and notify the authorities. Why would telling law enforcement be a gamble? The police would want to know how I knew about the bomb. If I told them about the truck driver and mind-reading, at the least, I would be ridiculed and sent away. At the worst, I could be arrested and put in a facility on a 5150 psychiatric hold for up to 72 hours. I drove out of the downtown area and called the police. I had to think fast. I had to be creative.
The phone rang a couple of times.
“Modesto Police Department.”
“Um, yeah, I was near downtown, on 13th Street near Needham, and I saw a rental truck with its back halfway rolled up. The truck was filled with all these big blue barrels and there were lots of wires connected to the top of them and something that looked like a laptop or a tablet on top of one of the barrels. The driver, I don’t think he knew the back of the truck was rolled up at first, but then he stopped and ran to the back of the truck and pulled the door down and locked it. He seemed nervous and was looking all around. I don’t think he saw me.”
“Oh really?” The voice on the other end said. “Did you get a license plate or anything?”
“Look man, the license plate said, B-B-O-O-M-Y; It looked like a fake license plate. I’ve seen lots of stuff on TV, crime shows, and action movies, you know. The blue barrels and the wires, it all looked like a bomb, like the one from Oklahoma City that blew up in the 1990s. Man, I’m scared. It was a yellow delivery truck with the name of the rental company on the side. The driver’s face was covered; he was wearing sunglasses and a face mask, but he had on a yellow baseball cap, a gray or tan jacket, and blue jeans. I think he wore some black work boots, but I am not sure. Would you please hurry? Please. You have my number; I’m getting out of here in case that thing goes off. Call me later.”
A minute or so later, I heard several sirens. There would be no explosion in downtown Modesto that day. The police intercepted the truck at the corner of 10th and J Streets and quickly arrested the driver. There was a timer in the cab of the truck that indicated the bomb would go off in 12 minutes and 33 seconds. Two officers jumped in the cab of the truck, and escorted by a couple of squad cars, sped westbound on J Street. The plan was to make a right turn onto 9th Street, a quick left onto L Street, and then follow L out to the farmland west of Modesto. L Street in downtown Modesto becomes Maze Boulevard once it crosses Highway 99, the Golden State Highway. At some point beyond the Modesto city limits, L Street/Maze Boulevard is also known as State Route 132, an asphalt ribbon that passes through miles and miles of farm and ranch land toward the hills on the west side of the California Central Valley.
This plan was not viable; a long freight train was passing slowly through downtown Modesto, and the only nearby way to get over the railroad tracks was to use the Needham-Kansas overpass. The truck made a right turn onto Ninth, moved quickly to make a right onto N Street, made a left onto 11th Street, a left onto Needham, then across the overpass to North Franklin (now labeled the Kansas Ave. extension), a left onto Kansas, a left onto Emerald Avenue, and finally a right turn onto Maze Boulevard, also known as State Route 132, where the truck headed as far out of town as it could before they ran out of time. The officers in the truck didn’t have much choice; they had to drive through heavily populated areas in west Modesto to get the truck out to the farmland west of the city. With the patrol cars leading the way, the truck got to the corner of Maze Boulevard and Stone Ave. in 11 minutes and 20 seconds. With the accelerator pedal pressed down all the way and held in place, the officers aimed the truck into an empty field and hopped out. They scrambled up and quickly got into one of the squad cars and moved to a safe distance.
A minute or so later there was a huge explosion that left a 100-foot-wide crater in a fallow field. Thankfully, no one was killed or injured, but a few nearby structures got damaged.
Traffic was blocked on Maze Boulevard in both directions for about half an hour. Then it remained congested because of all the reporters and curious onlookers gathered on the side of the road near the site of the explosion. On top of all that, several federal agencies were on the scene beginning their investigation, gathering bomb fragments and other evidence.
The investigation revealed that a heretofore unknown terrorist organization known as the Patriotic Vindicators was behind the bomb plot. The four people in the group were the types of people that the FBI director described when he discussed the dangers of homegrown violent domestic extremists: disaffected men who frequented so-called right-wing websites, men who let themselves get brainwashed into thinking that modern America represented an affront to their assumed entitlement, their whiteness, and their manhood. The first and only sentence in their tiny manifesto says, “We, the Patriotic Vindicators, despise what ZOG (Zionist occupied government) has done to our country and we will blow shit up until this country gets the message.” They were all arrested within a week of the explosion. The police and the FBI did not have to use intense questioning. The driver of the truck simply answered the questions the asked.
Outside the interrogation room, two police officers, a man and a woman, talked about the truck driver.
“Did you see how that jackass answered the questions so calmly, so matter-of-factly? He answered everything without any pressure from us. What’s up with that? He’s crazy, right?”
“I’m no psychiatrist, but the way he talks makes me think about something called antisocial personality disorder. He does not feel guilty and doesn’t care about the consequences he might have to face. I wonder how a person like that develops?”
“Maybe his mother didn’t breastfeed him when he was a baby,” the female officer joked.“Ha ha, and I’m not sure I’m supposed to laugh at that. But hey, Roxy, our shift starts in a few minutes. We have to deal with the press conference crowd at city hall. We better get over there.”