“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.
Everyone’s emotions remained on edge. It was a “big response,” in the words of one cop; they were used to covering crime scenes and they were constantly on the lookout for the “big crime” on any given night. Every time someone new entered the house, there was fresh potential for misunderstanding, which led to shouts and gesticulation among the crew. We cringed whenever that happened, because we suspected anything bad for them was likely to be twisted into something even worse for us.
One of the explosives techs tried repeatedly to bait Cubby, but he didn’t bite. The fellow could not let go of the notion Cubby had a meth lab, even though there was no evidence he did. Nowadays, meth is mostly cooked in big superlabs in Mexico, but lawmen everywhere dream of finding a drug factory in their backyard. It’s the stuff promotions are made of, but it was not to happen this n
ight.
The tech pointed to a vodka bottle and sneered, “Do you swig that stuff while you’re cooking meth?”
“No,” Cubby said, “and you shouldn’t swig it either, because it’s not vodka. It’s refined ninety-nine percent alcohol, and it would kill you to drink it. I use it in a recrystallization reaction.”
If only he’d known what recrystallization was, the tech might have had a wiseass response, but he was smart enough not to look like a bigger fool. The quiet didn’t last, though, as he saw another container a few minutes later. “That’s a lot of Xanax you have there,” he said, pointing smugly to a container sitting on the shelf below the sink.
The label was clearly visible, and it said Xylene.
“I think you must be confused,” Cubby answered patiently. “Xanax is a prescription pill. Xylene is a cleaning solvent. They sell Xylene at Ace Hardware.” Cubby couldn’t tell if the guy was ignorant or just dumb, but he left him to speculate to himself about the remaining chemicals. Out front, the bosses knew the real score. So far, everything was what Cubby said it was, and where he said it was located. But they were far from done.
They kept working, and we stayed anxious. Our biggest worry was that we had no idea whether the authorities were honest. Would they report what they found truthfully, or would they “discover” a case of dynamite and a pound of meth just in time for the late-night news? Murray, Perwak, and the other leaders seemed like standup guys to us, but we didn’t have the same confidence in the underlings, like the troll who’d baited my son, hoping to discover a meth lab. We knew the cops would get mad as hell if we challenged them, and if they were liars, they wouldn’t admit it anyway, so we decided to watch and judge them by their actions.
By nine o’clock there were sixty people on site, and all three local television stations were outside the police line, hoping to catch a story. None of them really knew what was going on, and we certainly weren’t talking. Gawkers who’d been drawn to the flashing lights stood behind the police line, bandying about rumors of a drug lab; others said there was a spill of hazardous chemicals in the basement. Only a few people knew that they were investigating a teenager’s home chemistry lab.
I’d heard the old adage any publicity is good publicity. Well, I turned down plenty of publicity that night, and I’m glad I did. There are times when tried-and-true advice is wrong, and that was one of them.
To this day I feel a debt of gratitude to most of the local news-people for not broadcasting any of the wild speculation that was rampant at the scene. Only one of the television stations succumbed, saying that “police were investigating a possible meth lab and guns” on their eleven o’clock news. Everyone else stuck to the facts, as given out by the police. They told reporters they were investigating a possible chemical spill (mostly true—chemicals were involved) and that no one had been arrested. Little Bear and I didn’t say a word; in fact, we stayed well clear of cameras and reporters the whole time they were there.
Most of the emergency responders had never been on a raid like this one, and they’d never been near an “explosives lab,” so I understood their excitement. Yet I knew from Cubby that there was only about the equivalent of a stick of dynamite in homemade explosive in his lab. It wasn’t packed into containers to make bombs. It was just loose, in plastic bags and trays. There were no weapons of any kind, anywhere. There was no propaganda and no political ideologue. Most important, there were no victims, and no complaints, at least not until the cops arrived. The truth made a pretty dull story.
The idea that an army was needed to remove that material and protect the neighborhood was just crazy. The same was true of the evacuation; the only hazard to Cubby’s neighbors was the invading army itself. His explosives were never a threat to any of them.
Things were only just beginning, but I could see where they were headed, and it did not look good. I had the two ranking agents telling me Cubby didn’t look like a dangerous criminal, but there was this huge response going on, and someone was surely going to be blamed.
Eleven o’clock came and went. More vans and more people had arrived. They now had a mobile lab parked in the driveway, where they were testing the compounds removed from Cubby’s lab. Most of the time, the tests simply validated what Cubby had told them. There were a few tense moments, when they thought they had found something unanticipated, but those results turned out to be lab errors and everyone relaxed.
Seeing a lull in the activity, I searched out Peter Murray and asked him what was happening. I guess he was feeling a bit better about things, because he smiled and said, “Every year, somewhere in the United States, ATF runs across a Boy Scout genius with a chemistry set,” he said. “I guess this is your year.” He then proceeded to tell me the story of David Hahn, the seventeen-year-old Boy Scout who tried to make a nuclear reactor in his parents’ shed. “I don’t know about the state, but I can definitely tell you the ATF has no criminal interest in your son. At this point, I just want to see the mess cleaned up.”
Encouraged by that, I sought out Gerry Perwak in his unmarked car. He said about the same thing but added that cops just decide who to arrest. They don’t make the decisions about who to prosecute. That’s up to the district attorney. Perwak’s words didn’t offer much comfort, and I drove home to a troubled sleep. At least I still had a house to return to. Cubby and his mom didn’t. They had to stay by the scene until the cops finally sent them to find a motel room a few miles away in Chicopee.
That was when they remembered Catto, their cat. When the raid started, the cops had locked her in the bathroom. Now they let Little Bear in briefly to retrieve her. When she went into the bathroom, she saw the medicine cabinet door opened a crack, so she looked inside. Every one of her pill bottles had been moved, and some of the lids were half open. She felt violated and wondered what else they had rummaged through.
When she went back outside, she ran into the hazmat chief and asked him how much longer they would be there. “I don’t know,” he said. “We still don’t know how we’re going to get all the chemicals out of this place. We may have to blow the house up and cover it with dirt.” She looked at him as if he were crazy, but he made it plain that he was serious. There were no words to say in response.
She took the cat and snuck her into the motel with Cubby. They cried themselves to sleep as Catto bounced from bed to bed, energized and wild after an evening locked in the bathroom amid all the clamor.
I got home in time to discover that my son was the lead story on the eleven o’clock news, on all three local stations. With horrified fascination, I switched from one newscast to the next, wondering what they would say. To my surprise and pleasure, the reporting was remarkably balanced. “Police are investigating a teenager’s chemistry lab in a South Hadley home,” ran one headline. None of the news stories identified my son by name, presumably because he was still a minor. Walking around earlier that evening, I’d overheard all sorts of wild speculation from reporters at the fringes of the scene, each one hoping to get a scoop. I was relieved that their fantasies of meth labs, guns, dynamite, and more hadn’t made it into the news. I wondered how long that would last.
The news crews were still there the next morning. The raid was on the front page of that day’s newspaper, complete with photos of the house and police cars. The headline read: “Possible Chemical Spill in South Hadley Home!” Disturbing as that was, it was a hell of a lot better than “Drug Lab Busted,” or any of the other rumors that bystanders had been feeding the reporters. I was glad to see the newspaper editors had followed the precedent set by the previous night’s television reporters; they stuck to what the police had told them, my son wasn’t mentioned by name, and there was no sensational speculation.
The newspaper’s online forums, however, were filled with all sorts of far-out innuendo. I’d heard some crazy stuff from spectators the night before, but the comments in the paper’s discussion area put all that to shame. Cases of explosives, toxic waste, nuclear accidents—“people
in the know” revealed it all. The National Enquirer could have taken lessons from the people who posted there. I wondered what we should do.
Meanwhile, my son had more pressing concerns. He’d given the cops an exact list of what he had, and so far, every test had proven him right. With all their talk of meth, there was not a single narcotic drug on the list. The only illegal chemicals were the small amounts of explosive he’d told them about in the initial interview. But the technicians kept making mistakes, or imagining things that weren’t there, and whenever that happened, they jumped on him. We were now in our second day of that, and he was sick of their sloppiness and the repeated accusations of trickery. Walking down the street for privacy, Cubby called the number I’d given him the night before. David Hoose was cross-country skiing that afternoon, and he’d stopped to rest at the top of Northfield Mountain when his phone rang.
As soon as he answered, my son introduced himself, then asked, “Are you my new lawyer?” Cubby sounded a little hesitant, but Hoose was hesitant too. He had not met any of us and knew next to nothing about my son or what he might have done. Criminal lawyers are asked to represent all kinds of people, and every attorney draws a line somewhere. For all Hoose knew, Cubby could have been the next Unabomber. He decided to ask.
“If I take your case, I’m not going to find out that you are affiliated with the Nazis, skinheads, or any other hate group, am I?” It was a reasonable question, given that Cubby’s lab was now dominating all the local news channels.