Arrest made in threats

Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009

She was right there in the building, according to detectives with the St. Mary's Bureau of Criminal Investigations.

A judge ordered Monday that Chantel Denise Cook, a 32-year-old Lusby resident, be held without bond on charges of making a false statement of an explosive device, eight times during a 12-day period.

St. Mary's detectives report that they were working overnight into Saturday morning to plan a raid at Cook's home, when the last bomb threat was phoned into the business that morning. The detectives teamed up with a state police helicopter crew and tactical squads to locate the woman and arrest her a short time later at her residence.

Throughout the series of phone calls to Wal-Mart, made from inside or outside its walls, no one receiving the threatening messages could identify the caller, detective Capt. Rick Burris said Monday at his office.

"They have hundreds of employees, and every time the call came in, someone else would get it," the captain said. So the police investigation turned to paperwork that was not immediately available.

"We had to wait to get the phone records from the Wal-Mart store," he said. "Once we were able to get the phone records, we had to determine what phone number was calling in the bomb threats. We had to determine who owned the phone, and who was using the phone."

The eight bomb threats all came from the same cell phone, Burris said, and investigators made use of technology allowing them to track the phone's specific location. Saturday's call came from the suspect's home, he said, but the Maryland State Police helicopter crew used that technology to later spot a sport-utility vehicle carrying the phone as it traveled toward the residence.

Cook was arrested during a police raid at her home assisted by the tactical squads from both counties, and charging papers allege that she admitted to calling in the bomb threats.

"It appears it was done simply because she didn't like her job there," the captain said. "She wouldn't have to come to work, or would get out of work while she was there."

The calls to the business that began Feb. 10 and continued into Saturday led each time to evacuations of the store's staff and customers, until law officers and bomb-detection police dogs could ensure that no explosive devices were there. Adjacent businesses including a trio of restaurants also were inaccessible during the initial incidents.

Cook said in court Monday that she has worked as an optician for Kaiser-Permanente for the last three months. The proceeding before St. Mary's District Judge John F. Slade III also delved into Cook's missing court last July on a misdemeanor theft charge from a bad-check investigation.

"I was actually in prison at that time," Cook told the judge. "It wasn't of my own doing."

She asked the judge for a preliminary hearing on the new charges, and pretrial release.

"My mom is an official of the county. My mom does bail bonds," Cook said. "I'm just asking to have a reasonable bond on both of my cases."

The judge ordered that she remain in jail.

A conviction for the felony offense of making a false statement of a destructive device carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, plus a $10,000 fine and restitution for the costs incurred by state and county governments in their response and by businesses subjected to an evacuation.

The Wal-Mart store estimated its losses from the incidents at more than $100,000, detective William D. Ray wrote in charging papers.

"This does not include surrounding businesses that suffered monetary loss, or the investigative hours needed to investigate each incident," the detective wrote in a statement of probable cause. "Also, the quality of life suffered by each patron visiting the surrounding areas of the Wal-Mart during the incident was severely impacted."

Burris said the cost to taxpayers of the law-enforcement response has not yet been tallied.

"There was a tremendous amount of expense due to the investigation, the man hours that went into it and getting the phone records," the captain said.

jwharton@somdnews.com