Man threatens to blow up state building over misspelled sign
Suspect blames failure to detonate on misspellings in instructions
May 29, 2013 Written by Anna Staver - Statesman Journal
A man brought a pressure cooker he claimed was a bomb into the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission office and told employees he tried to blow up their sign because it was misspelled on Wednesday morning.
“He walked quite confidently into our office as though he had a mission, and I think that was what alarmed me right off the bat,” Executive Director Vickie Chamberlain said.
The man, dressed in a button-up winter coat and stocking cap, placed the pressure cooker with wires sticking out on the counter in front of the receptionist around 9 a.m.
Leonard Burdek, 50, of Salem, told Chamberlain and the receptionist that he tried to blow up the agency’s outside sign, but the bomb didn’t work.
The sign spells out the agency’s name in blue letters and sits at the end of its parking lot at 250 Division Street NE. One side is missing the letter “D” in the word “and” so it reads: “Teacher Standards an Practices Commission.”
She didn’t know what happened to the sign, but Chamberlain said it’s possible that someone scraped the letter off or it wore off over time.
After discussing his failed attempt to detonate his bomb, the man complained that the instructions he downloaded to make the bomb also had misspellings.
Burdek implied that Chamberlain and her employees should be concerned about the level of education children receive given that his instructions were rife with errors.
The commission’s office is where people come to fill out their applications for a teacher’s license.
“We’re like the nursing board, only for teachers,” Chamberlain said. “He did not look like one of the educators we serve.”
Chamberlain asked Burdek to leave and motioned with her hands for another employee to call the police. When he noticed her signaling for someone to dial 911, Burdek left—taking the pressure cooker with him.
The staff immediately locked the doors and waited for Salem Police.
“He was probably in here a minute and a half or so,” Chamberlain said. “If he had left the bomb, we certainly would have evacuated.”
Police arrested Burdek in his van around 10 a.m. after employees called back to say they spotted him in a van nearby.
Lt. Dave Okada said the pressure cooker did not turn out to be a bomb. He was charged with disorderly conduct.
“It looks like he was just trying to get attention,” Okada said.
Chamberlain and she and her employees stayed at the office for the remainder of the day, but they locked the front doors—forcing people to knock in order to come inside.
“The doors will stay locked certainly for the next near term until we are all a little more calm and until we can feel a little more reassured about how we are going to handle these situations if they occur in the future,” Chamberlain said.
She also applauded the reactions of her employees who “did all the right things” and stayed calm while the man was in the building.
Chamberlain said she didn’t even think about the Boston Marathon bombing while it was happening. Brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev allegedly built homemade bombs using pressure cookers that killed three people and injured more than 200 others.
She instead focused on the idea that if he was holding the bomb then perhaps it wasn’t going to explode immediately.
“It’s kind of like a car wreck where it’s happening to you but you aren’t processing it,” Chamberlain said. “I think it’s one of the scariest things that we’ve had happen here.”
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