Raising Cubby (36 page)

Cubby was the first to arrive, with the investigators in tow. Agent Murray had told Cubby’s mom that four plainclothes cops
would conduct the search. Amazingly, he’d suggested that the tour of the lab would take only fifteen minutes.

When she arrived, they were waiting, just as they’d promised when they called her. They had not broken into the house, and they had not brought an army. There was just one new person: Special Agent John Murray, also of the ATF. At first I thought I’d heard his name wrong, but I soon realized it was a bizarre coincidence. Of all the federal agents who could come calling, who’d have imagined the ones we got would have the same last name? It was like meeting Darryl and the other brother Darryl, from the sitcom
Newhart
. At the time, though, it didn’t seem funny. After asking Little Bear to sign a form allowing them to search the house, they left her in her car in the driveway while Cubby showed them his lab. And so the circus began.

First a South Hadley police cruiser pulled into the yard. Then another, and a third. They’d gotten wind of something from the state police, and they wanted in. After all, it was their town. But Agent Murray was firm. They could guard the driveway, but they weren’t getting inside. “No sightseeing,” he told them. As they sat there, more cars and trucks from the state police began to arrive. Then the fire department appeared with their ambulance. The street in front of Little Bear’s house filled, and new arrivals lined both sides of the road. Neighbors wandered outside to see what was going on. Someone called the news, and vans full of reporters appeared.

Inside, the cops were deciding what to do. Cubby had walked them through the house and shown them to his lab. He pointed out every jar and tray and beaker, and what each one contained. Knowledgeable and cooperative as he was, the list was long. Some of Cubby’s chemicals were packed in commercial containers; others were in glass or plastic containers, labeled in Cubby’s handwriting. A few weren’t labeled, but he knew what they were.

The vast majority of Cubby’s chemicals weren’t explosive or even dangerous. The explosives he’d made were in very small quantities,
and stored separately from all the other chemicals. There were no bombs, detonators, or anything else scary.

Now the investigators’ job was to verify what Cubby had told them, and to carry off and dispose of any explosives. It was taking some doing for the cops to decide exactly how to go about that task. The bomb techs were accustomed to simpler scenes, where there was a box of dynamite, or a grenade, or even a cache of weapons. Cubby’s lab, with a hundred different chemicals in bags, jars, and bottles, was unlike anything they’d ever seen. Frankly, the array of compounds he had was way beyond their range of expertise. They were trained to recognize weapons, but there were no weapons to be found, just chemicals, and they weren’t chemists or engineers.

If they insisted on testing everything, cataloging individual samples, and removing the contents of the lab bit by bit, we knew it would become a very long job. However, that’s what they chose to do. The bottle may have said Drain Cleaner, but they tested it just to be sure. Lots of guys made good overtime that weekend.

As they would soon discover, every chemical my son had bought for his lab was legal and unregulated. Nothing was spilled and nothing was leaking. There was no cocaine hidden in the sugar. Despite that, the state police called for more bomb techs and what they described as a “Tier One hazmat response.” That meant another squad of technicians had to be summoned, with bags of Speedi Dri (an absorbent cleanup product), and many more forms to be filled out. It was shaping up to be a long night.

Cubby’s mom lives in a 1950s-era subdivision, one of a hundred Cape-style houses on orderly landscaped lots. Her neighbors are a solid conservative bunch, and the neighborhood is generally quiet and peaceful. Not that night. When I pulled in, the South Hadley cops had the street blocked off, and flashing emergency lights were everywhere. It was a Friday night, and there was more action on that street than anywhere else in western Massachusetts. Maybe all of New England.

What are all these people doing here?
I was shocked at the scene I encountered when I drove up. Cubby had said he was heading to his mom’s house with a few plainclothes cops following. What went wrong? For a moment I feared Cubby had something really bad in his mom’s basement—something I knew nothing about. Suddenly scared, I talked my way past the barrier and drove down a street clogged with people, police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, and finally Cubby’s little Subaru. I saw my son, standing with his mom in the yard, and felt a huge wave of relief. If he had anything awful in there, he would not have been walking around loose. I parked and got out of my car.

There were uniformed people everywhere. Some were cops, some were firemen, and others were not so easily identified. They flowed in and around the house and gathered in clumps in the street. Two cars had spotlights trained on the side door, which stood open to the night air. The whole thing was like a scene from a horror movie, where they light up the doorway and some slime-dripping monster walks out. But these weren’t monsters. They were the ATF.

After a moment, Agent Murray and Trooper Perwak walked over and introduced themselves. They’d been talking to my son for a few hours, but this was the first time I’d seen either of them. To my surprise, they did not seem monstrous at all. Perwak impressed me as a solid plainclothes trooper, the kind of fellow who might visit my company, seeking help in an investigation. I wasn’t too worried about him. It was the Feds who scared me. I turned to Murray, shook his hand, looked him up and down, and my first sense was of … relief. He struck me as a reasonable, intelligent, and articulate guy. Both of them were polite, respectful, and professional. There were no guns in sight.

“We’re in the process of evaluating your son’s lab,” Agent Murray told me. “Your son has been very cooperative. He’s given us a list of what’s inside and our technicians are in the process of checking it out. So far it’s going well.” I looked over at the house and wondered how “checking it out” required the army of people I saw tramping in and out. Unfortunately, the raiders had complicated matters tremendously, all in the name of procedure. The house had perfectly good lights, but they’d shut the power off as a precaution. Someone noticed the gas stove, and that scared them, because gas causes explosions. So they shut the gas off too. That meant there was no heat, and everyone had to work in bulky coats. With the electricity turned off, fifty flashlight beams pierced the darkness and lights illuminated the house from a generator truck outside.

Standing in the yard, I could not help being shocked by the massive
deployment of resources for what seemed to me a fairly trivial incident. The scale of the raid made for an enormous waste at a time when town budgets were already stretched too thin. The raid was also frankly very scary for everyone in the neighborhood. The sight of all those cops, with no one answering questions, must have led the neighbors to think there was something truly awful in that house.

One of the things that troubled me most was how the response had escalated, till it was crazily out of proportion for a teenager with a chemistry lab. The trouble was, every responder had a tiny and well-defined role, which made their individual tasks sound reasonable. All of them defended what they did by saying, “We’re just doing it by the book,” or “We’re being careful.” If I challenged the need for any of them to be there, the response was always that they knew best. Yet somehow those well-meaning individuals had added up to an invading army, with dozens of vehicles clogging the streets and countless men and women in uniforms trampling the house and the neighborhood, each one just doing his or her job. As I watched, I kept reminding myself that Cubby had brought everything there in the trunk of his car and set it up all by himself. This massive response was of their making, not his. One of the first things he’d done was offer to carry everything in his lab outside if they were scared or worried about entering. “I’ll do it for you. There’s nothing dangerous,” he said, in a spirit of innocent cooperation. They’d chosen a different path.

As the night wore on, people got tired and communication broke down. Tempers flared as mistakes were made. At one point, an explosives tech emerged from the basement in a panic. “Guys! We gotta get out of here! There’s a mason jar full of acetone peroxide ready to explode.” Everyone turned on Cubby in anger. “You lied to us!” the bomb tech shouted at him, and everyone ran out of the basement and backed away from the house, as if the whole thing was about to detonate.

Cubby kept his cool. “There’s no jar of explosive down there,” he said calmly. As the cops got over their initial panic and the house remained standing, Cubby looked at their photo of the “jar of explosive.” It was a mason jar, but it wasn’t full of acetone peroxide. It contained a harmless mix of water and baking soda. Cubby had told Agent Murray what was in each jar, but the techs who copied Cubby’s list made mistakes, confused themselves, and got scared. Who knows what would have happened if he wasn’t there to set them straight?

As Cubby explained over and over, there was no special hazard in his lab. He knew exactly what was down there. He repeated his offer to walk downstairs and bring the materials up for them. But they were determined to do it their way. A bomb technician put on a Kevlar suit, walked ponderously down the stairs, and retrieved the results of Cubby’s teenage chemistry experiments as if they were booby traps in a war zone. Later, one of the cops claimed the technician had risked life and limb to clean up the lab. It seemed laughable to me, but I guess they didn’t know any better.

It got worse. Over the next two days, two Kevlar-suited techies would make twenty-plus trips up and down the stairs, bringing up one little bottle at a time. Each one was carefully placed in the back of a dump truck, covered with half a ton of sand, carried to the South Hadley landfill, and blown up with sacks of government-supplied explosives.

For training purposes, it was great. For doing the job that needed doing with Cubby’s lab, it was like killing a gnat with a bazooka—a classic example of government in action. Rather than letting one guy change his own lightbulb, they called in a crew of fifty workers and twenty supervisors to do it for him. I was very concerned that I was the guy with the “lightbulb problem,” and that these people were going to expect me to pay for their “assistance” changing it. But I kept those thoughts to myself.

I asked Murray if Cubby was going to be arrested, and his answer
was cautiously reassuring. “I can’t say what will happen, but at this moment I am not seeing any reason to arrest your son. He has cooperated with us all along, and everything he’s told us has proven to be true.” I walked to the house, but the cops at the door shooed me away. As I turned around, a huge ten-wheel truck appeared, and it morphed into a Mobile State Police Command Center right before my eyes. They were taking over the neighborhood.

I felt a new flash of fear. Could Cubby have a lot more explosives than I realized? Leading him away from the others, I asked him again how much explosive material was inside.

“A few hundred grams,” he said. “There’s about as much explosive as a bag of fireworks. Certainly less than a couple sticks of dynamite. I told them everything that was there.” I wondered if I had underestimated the hazard of what he’d made, so I asked again. He thought a minute. “Obviously, the stuff I made is dangerous if it goes off in your hand. But if it went off in the house and you were out here, nothing much would happen. It would make a bang, and maybe break a window. That’s about it. It would blow up the shelf in my lab.”

“Do they know that?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, “I told them several times.”

Hearing that, the reaction we were seeing seemed totally inexplicable, especially when I recalled the ATF agents saying, “Everything your son told us is proving to be true.” I didn’t know what else to say. Apparently, the raiders didn’t know what to say either, because they had gone into their command center and started making phone calls at ten o’clock at night. First they called John Drugan, the state police chemist. Whatever he told them wasn’t enough, because they then called Kirk Yeager, who heads the FBI’s explosives lab in Quantico, Virginia. I started getting worried again.

It was time to call the lawyer. To my surprise, he actually answered the phone late on a Friday night. He was at a restaurant in Northampton, but he stepped outside to talk to me. He sounded
smart and confident, two traits that I value. My lawyer friend had told him what he knew of the story, and I added what more I had found out. It was too late for a lawyer’s standard advice—don’t talk to the cops—but he did tell Cubby to say as little as possible. “Call me immediately if they arrest anyone, no matter what time it is,” he said. I noted he left the door open by saying
anyone
. At this stage of the game, he didn’t know who the potential defendants might be.

After repeating the lawyer’s advice, I gave Cubby his cell number. “If they grab you and I’m not around, call him.” Cubby nodded soberly.