Aug. 22--A 2002 black Ford F-350 pickup truck held a surprise after sitting outside an Agua Fria home for about three years.
Michelle Lopez had the vehicle taken to Affordable Alignments at 1501 Sixth St. for repairs on Thursday. On Tuesday, someone cleaning out the truck discovered a cylindrical, heavy object wrapped in electrical tape with wires sticking out.
Santa Fe Police Capt. Aric Wheeler said the object, which resembled a pipe bomb, was in fact filled with an explosive material. Police along with the city's bomb squad were called to the scene before 12:30 p.m. to collect the object, which an employee had set behind the business, and had it in hand by 3 p.m. The squad detonated the device at its bomb range later that afternoon, Wheeler said.
Wheeler said police would investigate how the device came to be in the truck and who could have made it.
Lopez was dumbfounded while she watched the bomb squad work.
"I'm shaken up," she said. "I don't know what to think. I just want to fix the truck and get it back on the road."
She said the truck belonged to her late ex-husband Alfred Martinez, whom she said was a driver for Coca Cola and was well-known around Santa Fe.
He died about 17 months ago, she said, but his truck had been sitting unused at the house on Agua Fria for about three years. Lopez wanted to repair the truck to pass it along to her 12-yearold daughter.
Wheeler said that the businesses in the immediate vicinity of the auto repair store were evacuated while the crew worked and cross streets were blocked with emergency vehicles. Wheeler said the squad estimated that the device would have a blast radius of about 300 feet.
Wheeler said the suspicious object was wrapped in a "bomb blanket" to suppress any blast in case it detonated without warning.
Copyright 2012 - Albuquerque Journal, N.M.
