The practical joke a Columbia man played on his brother tied up more than a dozen state and county public safety officers for 90 minutes and closed off a portion of downtown Glen Burnie Tuesday afternoon, authorities said yesterday.
Eight county police officers, an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent, a bomb technician from the state fire marshal's office, county firefighters and two trucks from the State Highway Administration rushed to the law offices of Dennis Weisberg after a secretary found a package that appeared to be a bomb.
The package, a shirt box wrapped in brown paper stamped with skeletons and a swastika drawn in the upper right corner, was addressed to Mr. Weisberg with letters cut out of newspapers and magazines. It contained a spent shotgun shell and a puzzle called "How To Kill A Lawyer."
Mr. Weisberg, who is Jewish, said Wednesday that he thought the incident was related to a recent string of hate crimes in Annapolis and South County, in which a synagogue and a beauty shop owned by a black woman were vandalized.
But he found out later it was a prank engineered by his brother, a 32-year-old musician, and his two sisters, whom he would not identify.
Mr. Weisberg said he called family and friends Wednesday night to tell them of the incident. When he reached his 41-year-old sister in Atherton, Calif., she became curiously silent, then confessed that his siblings were behind the prank, he recounted.
The woman told him that his 36-year-old sister, who lives in Houston, and his brother got together on a shopping trip last Thanksgiving in Atherton and decided to send him the puzzle in a scary package, complete with the stamped-on skeletons, spent shotgun shell and swastika.
"It was an attempt at being cute with a gift [that went] beyond bad," said Mr. Weisberg, who added that his brother and sisters are remorseful to the point of being humiliated.
Mr. Weisberg's brother left the package outside the door of the first-floor office in the 7400 block of Baltimore-Annapolis Blvd. about 1 p.m., where Mr. Weisberg's secretary, Kelly Bowers, found it as she was going out for lunch.
Ms. Bowers thought the package was suspicious and called county police, who evacuated the building, called the county Fire Department and a bomb technician from the state fire marshal's office and blocked off a portion of Baltimore-Annapolis Boulevard, Officer Bell said.
The bomb technician took the package to Sawmill Creek Park in a State Highway Administration truck to detonate it safely in case it was a bomb. A second truck packed with sandbags to act as a buffer against a possible explosion followed the first.
When he arrived at the park, the technician fired a round into the package, but nothing happened, Mr. Bell said.
"I guess there's no such thing as criminal stupidity, but I'd like to see them charged [with that]," Mr. Weisberg said of his siblings.