Bluefield Daily Telegraph Staff Report
BLUEFIELD, W.Va. – Bluefield police, after spending much of Tuesday dealing with an attempted bank robbery, evacuated the Bluefield Municipal Building after a dispatcher received a bomb threat.
A dispatcher at the Bluefield Police Department received a telephone call approximately 8:52 p.m. Tuesday, Chief Dennis Dillow said later.
“We had a call come in to our dispatch,” Dillow said. “It was a blocked number. It stated ‘You killed my brother. I put a bomb in the building.’”
The officer in charge, Lt. C.S. Myers, evacuated the municipal building. Bluefield police officers and members of the Bluefield Fire Department swept all three floors of the building, and the West Virginia State Police sent a K-9 unit with a bomb-sniffing dog. Dillow said. Two Princeton suspects being housed in the Bluefield City Jail were evacuated, too, and turned over to the Princeton Police Department.
No devices were found, and the evacuation lasted for lasted approximately an hour, Dillow said. The municipal building had been on lockdown since Tuesday morning when a man armed with three firearms and a device made to resemble a bomb attempted to rob two downtown Bluefield banks. The suspect, later identified as Cedric Maurice Williams, 33, of Bluefield, was killed during an exchange of gunfire with police.
The investigation into the bomb threat continued Wednesday.
