The suspicious package was very suspicious.

It was spring break in the early ‘00s, and the world was a new and more dangerous place. The towers had fallen, and wars were being waged, but nothing stands between college-aged co-eds and their beer. The kids this year were doubling down though. With war in the air and feelings of patriotism at an all-time high, people were “partying like it was 1999,” as we used to say back in the day.

For those of us in the security industries, it was a high time as well. Money can’t buy safety, but it can buy the illusion of preparedness. Whole new industries had cropped up seemingly overnight, and the newly formed Department of Homeland Security had Carte Blanche to fund anything that might make America feel safe again.

But it was all a sham, really. You could never predict what some lone individual with a weapon might do. You could only hope to intimidate them into hesitant inaction with a security blanket spun of old platitudes and new slogans.

The spring break of this year was just as fun and just as dangerous as it had always been. People would drink too much, do stupid things, and sometimes die. Their situational awareness seemed only to be focused on what might get them laid. Muggers and thieves would graze upon the target-rich environment with reckless abandon. Murderers and rapists would ply their trades, concealed by the endless noise of other lesser crimes. Almost no crimes would be actively prevented, no matter what the politicians might promise. Instead, mountains of papers would grow as reported, yet unsolved, crimes would snowball for a period of a few weeks, leaving a lingering investigative caseload filled with red herrings and dead ends destined to go unsolved. Very few of those would end up in an arrest unless the perps were particularly stupid, lazy, or reckless. Even fewer would end up in convictions. Those few convictions would usually be for minor offenses like public nudity, public drunkenness, or brawling. The entire law enforcement process was an endless charade that had been going on for over two decades with little hope of ever changing. Only now, it also had the invisible threat of possible small-time terrorists looking to score media points on the world stage to boost their profile.

I may seem cynical, but I see it every day. I have earned it.

Not to worry though. If the world is indeed going to hell in a handbasket, I have found it best to be the one holding the handle. So I boldly stand on the periphery as a hazardous devices technician for the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office. We are the Bomb Squad. Our job, to protect the citizens of Daytona Beach from the Osama Bin Ladens and Timothy McVeighs of the world. Although lately, this mostly seemed to be accomplished by parking our sparklingly new fully equipped bomb truck, with robot, right in the middle of the Daytona beach strip with all the lights flashing, in full uniform, and sweating.

Well, actually, we took turns sweating. The inside of the truck was air-conditioned.

For eight to ten hours a day, we sat there providing a reminder of safety and authority, bored to tears, as we watched the pretty young boys and girls walk back and forth in various states of drunkenness and undress. They could be naked. They could be passed out drunk, or worse, vomiting into the street. We didn’t care. We would call someone else to come deal with it because OUR JOB was to sit in that spot and “provide vigilant security.” We knew it was a lie. Osama Bin Laden was not coming. Any potential Timothy McVeigh was likely drunk as everyone else and probably looking at wet boobs through a thin white t-shirt. We were just an illusionary security blanket, a flashing reminder that Law and Order would be upheld, a least in theory. I wasn’t complaining as it certainly beat walking the strip in body armor on patrol, and the overtime was incredible.

So you can imagine my surprise when about 1 PM on a Wednesday, the time most of the previous night’s zombies begin to rise and shamble about looking for sustenance, we received a call-out. It comes over the radio that a suspicious package had been spotted hanging off a back door at the Hard Rock hotel. Very irregular. I kicked Charlie awake. He had been napping in the back of the truck. Then I called out to Dan, whose turn it was to stand outside looking official. Charlie fired up the truck and began to negotiate his way out of the perpetual traffic jam that is the Daytona Strip during spring break, and we headed towards Jessamine Blvd.

We eventually arrived on the scene, and there was nothing. Well, almost nothing. The bosses back at the barn were understandably concerned about causing a panic. So the front of the hotel was business as usual, the beachside was too. The only sign that there was any trouble were the two cruisers blocking access to the parking lot. With a wave, they let us enter, and we proceeded toward the back corner of the lot, where there was an access door to a stairwell that led to the more expensive suite rooms of the hotel. As promised, there was a raggedy-looking backpack dangling off the doorknob.

Well shit.

At least it’s not a car bomb. That was a good thing. It meant no one was looking for a major body count. But this scenario did read like a small device, in a prime location. It was big enough to cause a major panic and get some air time on the world news circuit. It was also big enough to put a sudden end to Spring Break for the year. The reputation of a four-star hotel and a multi-million dollar tourist event was on the line. That was just enough motivation for a terrorist, so this could be it. This could be the real thing.

We set up shop at the street side entrance of the parking lot, which was about as far away as we could get, and deploy the robot. We didn’t want to move the device or disturb it in any way. We didn’t know what sort of device we were dealing with. It might have a motion-sensitive trigger that would set the device off. But we couldn’t get a good angle to X-ray the package with the pack hanging there either. So we turned down the arm speed and gently grasped the pack, lifting it off the doorknob. Pivoting the arm about 45 degrees off-axis, we set the pack down on the asphalt and pulled back from it to assess our next maneuver.

Another round trip with the robot to deploy our X-ray device was less illuminating than we would have liked. We could detect a large round metallic object of some sort but no recognizable details. With some manipulation, we manage to park the robot’s tracks onto one of the backpack’s straps, and with the gripper, we slowly unzipped the backpack to see what is inside. However, it revealed was a plain box inside. It was wrapped in brown paper with no visible marking of any kind. There is no further hint as to what was inside.

Several hours had gone by, and we were on our robot’s second battery pack. We needed to resolve the situation soon. The clock was ticking, and we had no idea if this device was triggered by a time device or a cell phone. So we decided to disarm the device with a PAN shot. A PAN disruptor is like a cannon made of a titanium tube that uses a shotgun blank as a charge and water as the projectile. At a distance of fewer than three feet, it will instantly but gently dismantle any explosive device. It could also tear a hole in a steel door big enough to stick your head through. More than three feet away though, and it is mostly harmless. The robot was equipped to mount two of these, but we only needed the one. With the arm in place, we hollered out “FIRE IN THE HOLE” three times and then detonated, all while keeping an eye out for where the debris flew as we would need that for the forensic analysis later.

Imagine our surprise when all we got was a shredded backpack, cardboard bits, a breached metal pot, and a cloud of grey dust.

That wasn’t right.

Was it a biological weapon?

It was biological, of a sort. We had just killed a dead guy.

You see, earlier that day, Martha Bloomfield, an 80-year-old woman from Missouri, had arrived in Daytona to spend a week with her husband. She had parked her rental car in front of the hotel and had left her husband in the car while she went inside to check-in. Her husband sat there in the front seat, with the windows down, inside of an urn that was packed in a cardboard box for protection.

Harold had died several months before, but the trip had already been planned and paid for. So Martha thought that she should take the trip anyway and decide to bring his cremated remains with her for one last hurrah together.

So enters our criminal mastermind, Carl Bass. He was strolling by the car, as he would do at many hotels up and down the strip. He scanned the area looking for crimes of opportunity, like an unattended purse, or a camera, or a cardboard box sitting on the front seat of a car with its windows down. Carl casually leaned in, grabbed the box, and then casually walked away like he had no cares in the world. We know this now because it was all caught on camera. We got a particularly good look at his face when, about an hour later, he showed up at the front desk looking to drop something off into the “lost and found.” It seems he “found” out that the box contained cremated remains, and he felt guilty of something more than just theft.

Unfortunately, the desk clerk was very busy. As one might expect, a crowd of people were all trying to check out of the hotel simultaneously at the very last minute. Carl was asked to wait. But Carl didn’t want to wait. Carl was a criminal who had gone way off script and was now very out of his comfort zone. He wanted to be rid of the incriminating goods, and he wanted it now.

So Carl got a backpack out of his car, checked it carefully for any clues that might lead back to him, and then placed the cardboard box, with the urn containing Harold’s remains, inside the backpack. He then went to the hotel’s parking lot. There he found a service door and hung the backpack on the knob for someone else to find. We know it was him, because there were cameras there too.

None of this was of any comfort to me, nor Charlie or Dan, as we spent the next few hours in 90+ degree heat with ALL the humidity, in full uniform, on hands and knees with small brooms sweeping up poor dead Harold.

Carl was arrested the very next day on charges of theft, and littering.

Harold and Martha were reunited a few days later after the paperwork had been cleared up.

They are both living (relatively speaking) comfortably in a lovely two-bedroom condominium purchased by the city of Daytona Beach and the Volusia County Sheriff’s Dept. with funds provided by the Department of Homeland Security in lieu of any potential lawsuits.

In my defense, the suspicious package was very suspicious.