Did Disgruntled Customer Threaten to Blow Up Safeway?

D.C. has the Social Safeway, the Soviet Safeway, and the Secret Safeway. We almost had the Shrapnel Safeway.

According to police, the Adams Morgan supermarket closed briefly Sunday evening due to a bomb scare. Officer D.J. Jackson, a department spokesperson, says the police received a bomb threat, prompting the bomb squad to evacuate the store and cordon off the area. “It was a hoax. Nothing was found,” he says, adding that the person delivering the threat “was nuts.”

Police would not reveal any additional details, but Victoria Wheeler, a security guard at the Safeway who was on duty Sunday evening, suspects a disgruntled customer. “A young lady came in and was disturbed because she had left the store for about an hour and they had put her groceries back,” she says. The woman’s cart was filled with perishables, Wheeler says, like shrimp and other seafood, and she left the store to get more money. When she returned to find her cart empty, she got “really upset,” Wheeler says, and had a bit of a fit, yelling “and cussing really loud.” The police had to escort the woman out, Wheeler says, and two or three minutes later they evacuated the Safeway. It was closed for two hours starting around 6 p.m., she says. Wheeler says she did not see anything that looked like a bomb.

Adams Morgan resident Carol Miller was about to pay for her groceries when the checker told her she had to leave. The place was surrounded by cops, she wrote in an e-mail, and she wondered whether the health department had finally decided to shut the place down. “That Safeway is awful. I swear they ship the nastiest and oldest produce in to that store, and fruit flies were everywhere.”

Craig Muckle, a Safeway spokesperson, says that Safeway-specific bomb threats are “very, very rare.”