WESTFIELD – An entrance to a downtown supermarket was blocked off Tuesday afternoon as city emergency responders worked to determine if a safe found in a shopping cart at a Main Street supermarket was a threat to the public.
City police were notified at 12:59 p.m. that a suspicious item had been found locked to a shopping cart near the outside storage area for propane tanks at the Stop and Shop store.
The store manager had called and reported that a briefcase was locked to the shopping cart which had been in place for about a half hour.
Officer Harry Sienkiewicz responded to the report and found that a safe with a combination lock was secured to the shopping cart with a locked cable and said that something appeared to be oozing from the safe.
Sienkiewicz requested assistance from the Fire Department and Deputy Chief Andrew Hart came to the store and also deemed the fire safe to be suspicious. The eastern entrance to the store was cordoned off but the store was not evacuated
The store manager reviewed the security video from the parking lot and found that the cart had been dropped off a pickup truck by a subcontractor employed to retrieve strayed shopping carts.
The contractor was reached by phone and the investigators were told that the cart had been recovered on Woronoco Avenue.
Sienkiewicz reports that the State Police bomb squad was notified but declined to respond saying that the safe was not a threat because, if it had been explosive, it would have detonated when the cart was roughly dropped from the pickup truck used to return it to the parking lot.
Hart reports that, once advised that it was safe to forcibly open, the door of the safe was pried open and it was found to be empty.
An officer opined that the material which had appeared to be suspiciously oozing from the box had actually been insulation used to protect the contents from fire.
