Bomb scare rattles WHS

September 30, 2005

MARY AMES/Frontiersman reporter

WASILLA - A Wasilla High School student was in police custody Thursday afternoon after school officials found what could have been an incendiary device in his car.

Acting on a tip from students late in the morning, two assistant principals searched the student's car. They found four .44 magnum shells, a brick of .22 shells and a plastic squeeze bottle sealed in plastic wrap. The bottle had a paper towel sticking out of the top.

The 11th-grade student told WHS Principal Dwight Probasco that the shells were in his car from hunting trips and he'd forgotten they were there. The plastic bottle was filled with black powder, he said, for after school when he and a friend were going to set it off in a field.

The bottle was placed in a vault near the school's main entry way. The hallways were sealed by closing the fire doors and the front of the building was cleared, but students remained in classes. The front doors were locked.

Dave Eller, the school's police resource officer, contacted the Wasilla Police Department. The department sent officer Jentry Crain, formerly with an Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit,wholooked over the device and determined it could be explosive.

Jentry called the Army's 716th EOD unit at Fort Richardson, which dispatched a team of three explosives specialists, along with a federal officer from the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau, shortly after noon.

The team suited up one man in full body armor who went into the school, unlocked the school door and the vault, X-rayed the device and returned the X-rays to the other team members to develop. It took more than an hour of careful work for them to determine the device could be safely removed from the school for later disposal.

At about 3 p.m., the school reopened its front doors, allowing after-school activities to resume and life to return to a somewhat normal footing.

But for Principal Probasco, it wasn't just another day.

"This was a strange day," Probasco said. "It was so far out of the norm."

About 9 a.m., he got a call from Palmer High School, he said, with a report of vandalism that seemed to be the work of Wasilla High students. The usual sophomoric vandalism, spray-painted vulgarities, paint poured on the new rubberized running track, damage to the new scoreboard and benches would take time and money to fix. Probasco viewed the damage and returned to school determined to make things right.

"I got on the intercom and announced the damage," he said. "And I offered a $500 reward for information that would identify the students who did this. I graduated from Palmer High School, back when it was the Palmer-Wasilla Falcons. Fred Machetanz was one of our biggest supporters. Who would hurt something he helped to build?" Probasco said of the PHS football field, which was named after Machetanz, a local artist and supporter of the Palmer High football program.

Although the offer of the reward may have led to the tip to look in the car with the ammunition, Probasco said he doesn't think it was related to the vandalism.

But the chickens were.

During the lunch hour at Palmer High, a Wasilla student released five chickens into the cafeteria.

"That chicken guy got caught," Probasco said. "But you don't want to see this escalating payback. What if 25 Palmer football players chased him down the highway and something happened?"

The reward for identifying the field vandals has gone up to $1,500.

"We'll see where it goes," Probasco said. "I haven't had a lot of time to focus on it."

Contact Mary Ames at

352-2284 or mary.ames@

frontiersman.com.