There is so much happening these days that it is almost impossible to keep up. But before high-speed internet became ubiquitous, things felt really slow. Americans got their news from the same newspapers, watched the same nightly TV anchors, and actually had time to talk about current events before the news cycle moved on. So you would think that the 1975 LaGuardia Airport explosion, which killed 11 people and injured 75 others, would be something that millennials and older generations would know a lot about. instead, As this recent Slate article highlightsIt’s a bombing that has been largely forgotten.
I had certainly never heard of the bombing of LaGuardia before reading the article. One reason for this may be that I was 13 years old when this incident occurred and New York City was a long way from Watkinsville, Georgia. And yet, I still know about a lot of other events that happened before I was born. From the racists who blew up Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 to the Unabomber, I thought I knew a lot. But as the Slate article makes clear, I’m far from the only fully grown person in this country who never knew that someone detonated a bomb inside LaGuardia on December 29, 1975. Chances are, you didn’t even know about it.
Despite being known as “one of the greatest cold cases of the 20th century”, there was no fatal terrorist attack in the US until the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and even survivors reportedly feel forgotten. He did not take Slate’s phone call seriously at first:
In an effort to reconstruct the story of what happened that winter night, I have spoken to people close to the incident, including survivors, family members of the victims, and investigators. No one, including investigating agencies, had contacted him about the bombing for decades. When I began leaving messages for them, one survivor wondered if the phone call was a prank.
Like 25 sticks of dynamite being released
As Slate points out, the US certainly didn’t move because the eruption was small or failed to make news at the time:
The explosion was huge, with an intensity equivalent to 25 sticks of dynamite. It was as if a twister had hit the terminal. A 12-foot-wide hole was left in the 8-inch-thick concrete roof. Plateglass windows the length of a football field were blown out. Pieces of red lockers were scattered across the parking lot. Water is flowing from broken pipes.
All told, an estimated 75 people were injured as a result of the explosion, and 11 died, including Stamey, Patterson, Bull, and Musicaro. The violence was such that, within a few minutes, 175 pints of blood were immediately sent from the bank on Amsterdam Avenue to the hospitals of the city. The bodies lay in pine boxes before being taken to the medical examiner’s office. It described a human head resting on a window ledge and a pool of blood drenching the island next to the parking lot. The following evening, Ike Pappas of CBS News reported, “The explosion rocketed upwards and outwards,” with the deceased “caught in the crossfire of glass and metal, which cut off his arms and legs and dismembered his body.”
“It was a scary incident,” recalled the EMS dispatcher on duty that night in Queens.
It is believed to be the only deadly terrorist attack on American soil that decade. 1973 arson attack on the Upstairs LoungeNew Orleans gay bar where 32 people died, and 15 were injured. At the time, questions arose about whether or not the fire was deliberately set, which helped keep what is now considered arson in the news. The LaGuardia bombing was, or at least should have been, a big deal that people talked about throughout the 1980s and even ’90s.
Even NYC has moved on
While some survivors of the LaGuardia bombing are still alive, no one was charged in connection with the attack. And this is despite an extensive investigation in which the FBI assigned 120 investigators to interview more than 5,000 individuals and investigate leads in 38 states. Many groups were suspected Due to involvement in the bombing, but two years without any major arrests, the FBI moved on and sent all but a handful of investigators to other cases. It certainly didn’t help that NYC’s David Berkowitz, otherwise known as Son of Sam, started killing people around the same time, and it took a massive investigation of its own to track him down.
You would think the city would have done more to remember the LaGuardia bombing. Or that you might be able to watch a documentary about it. As the author of the Slate article learned, NYC has essentially moved forward just like the rest of the country:
In the years since, journalists have occasionally re-watched the bombing, often with the assistance of (now former NYPD Deputy Chief) Edwin Dreher. (Dreher, who died shortly before, was troubled by the case and took the file home after his retirement in 1983.) But these scattered stories are the exception. Even in our true-crime-saturated culture, the story of the LaGuardia Airport bombing is little known. There is nothing about it in the municipal archives of New York City or the stacks of the Queens Historical Society. As best as I can tell, the bombing is not the subject of any book or documentary. It says something about the extent to which this has been forgotten that when I began contacting people associated with the incident in the lead up to the 50th Anniversary, they were all surprised to hear from a reporter.
Officially, the case remains open, and barring a deathbed confession from the perpetrator, it seems unlikely we will ever know who placed the bomb or why. The case quickly went cold and the terrorists responsible may not even survive. At the very least, we owe it to those whose lives were forever changed by the explosion to remember what happened. It is possible that due to the new interest in the case, someone may eventually come forward with information that will help us finally unravel the mystery. It is not possible, but it is not impossible either.
So, there’s more in the original article Head over to Slate to read the whole thing. It’s long, but it’s more than worth it. I promise.
