Witnesses Describe Hearing & Feeling I.F. Bomb Explosion
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IDAHO FALLS – Witnesses say they felt the ground shake and heard a loud explosion when a bomb went off at an Idaho Falls law office early Friday morning.
Firefighters and police responded to the explosion and fire at the Swafford and Ward Law Firm at 525 9th St. around 12:45 a.m.
“We heard a big boom and saw a mushroom cloud,” says Dillon Stone, a teenager who was attending the Idaho Falls High School Tiger football campout nearby. “When we got there, we saw a gas can that had been exploded. It looked like this wasn’t an accident.”
Idaho Falls police detectives say someone intentionally set up a homemade bomb at the front door of the law office.
Alicia Cuellar lives across the street from the law firm.
“We were so scared,” Cuellar says. “We heard a car stop and we heard a door open. Then we heard [the car] we leave and all of a sudden it sounded like a bomb because the whole house shook.”
Cuellar says people often work in the building at night. Police said nobody was inside the building or injured.
The force of the explosion was so powerful that debris blasted through a nearby fence and into a home on Flora Circle.
“This was as if someone had slammed the roof on our house,” Snel Williams, who lives two blocks away, said. “I though, ‘Oh my gosh, what was that?'”
Detectives haven’t named any suspects and are continuing to investigate the bomb. They ask anyone with information to contact Idaho Falls police at (208) 529-1200.
The Swafford law firm issued a statement late Friday night. Click here to read it.
