CVS Bomb Scare Thursday Mirrors Earlier Walgreens Scare

by | Jul 31, 2014

For the second time in less than two months, an East Greenwich pharmacy had a bomb threat phoned in, this time at the CVS on Main Street Thursday afternoon. A similar threat happened at Walgreens, 1000 Division St., in June.

On Thursday, July 31, a man using a Middle Eastern accent called the store at around 2:40 p.m. and told the employee who answered that someone had been to the store earlier in the day and placed a bomb there with the intention of killing everyone, said EGPD’s Lt. Robert Siple.

The employee immediately hung up the phone, someone called 911, and the store was evacuated. When police arrived, the rest of the plaza was evacuated. In addition to EGPD, members of the State Police, a bomb-sniffing dog, and a bomb technician from the state Fire Marshal’s office responded to the threat. 

After searching inside and outside of CVS and surrounding buildings, police allowed people back into the stores at around 3:45 p.m., Siple said.

“It follows the line very closely,” Siple said, referring to the Walgreens incident and others around the country. In the past two days alone, there have been bomb threats called in to pharmacies in Washington, Pa., Bozeman, Mt., and Princeton, N.J.

In the EG Walgreens incident in June, the caller told the employee to activate prepaid cards, and that same request has happened at many of the pharmacy bomb scares that have taken place across the country. It didn’t happen here, but Siple said he thought might be because the employee hung up as soon as the threat was made.

Although the episode today and the one in June turned out to be false alarms, “you still have to take it extraordinarily seriously,” Siple said of threats like these.

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