Exiting the New York City subway and approaching the area of 23rd Street where an explosion had occurred only a few minutes earlier, Peter Shearer found law enforcement barricades in place, a heavy police presence on the ground and helicopters hovering overhead.
But even though the shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bomb that went off Saturday night injured 29 people and blew out building windows, Shearer, a Northampton native who lives in the Chelsea section of the city just a block and a half from the site of the incident, said he found reasonable calm when he got there.
“Surprisingly, it was not chaotic, even though a lot of people were on the streets,” Shearer said.
“There was no smell, no dust, nothing particularly disturbing,” Shearer said.
A doctor in the department of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine for 15 years, Shearer, 49, said Monday that such an incident may be something people living in the city are accustomed to.
“It may be odd that there’s not more shock, but that may be a New York-centered thing,” Shearer said. “There was no real big sense of ‘I can’t believe this happened here.’”
Living in the city through several incidents, including the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Shearer said an elevated presence of police officers didn’t seem unusual as he walked toward the site of the explosion, near the Associated Blind Housing facility.
As he reflects on what he saw, he finds it ironic that people were being sent away from the bomb site toward the location of a second device that did not go off.
At Mount Sinai, Shearer was already part of the planning for ensuring there are additional beds available with the U.N. General Assembly convening in the city. That is a normal precaution with world leaders gathered.
On Sunday, there were some streets shut down and subway entrances closed, but by Monday, many of these had reopened. Shearer said he experienced no real inconveniences in getting to work.
His 10-year-old son, who attends an elementary school in the neighborhood, was in for a normal day, though parents were reminded of the lockdown and shelter in place should there be any additional incidents.
Ahmad Rahami, 28, believed to be the suspect in the incidents, was arrested Monday.
Shearer said he would like to know more about his motivations, with possible links to a pipe bomb placed at a benefit road race in Seaside Park, New Jersey, which give the incidents “a very strange quality.”
“Why a 5K race in New Jersey, why a Dumpster in front of a home for the blind?”
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
