Man held after subway scare
NEW YORK — A man suspected of placing two devices that looked like pressure cookers in a New York City subway station Friday, causing an evacuation and snarling the morning commute, has been apprehended, police said.
Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said Saturday morning on Twitter that a man seen in surveillance video holding one of the objects was taken into custody. Police identified the objects as rice cookers and determined they were not explosives.
Police say the man was apprehended about 12:45 a.m. Saturday in the Bronx and taken to a hospital for treatment and observation. Police did not specify what, if any, injuries or condition he was being treated for.
A West Virginia sheriff’s department identified the man as Larry Kenton Griffin II of Bruno, W.Va., and said he had a criminal history in the state.
The Logan County Sheriff ’s Department said it has arrested Griffin, 26, at least three times in the last eight years, including a 2017 arrest on suspicion of sending obscene material to a minor.
Griffin’s cousin Tara Brumfield told a Huntington, W.Va., television station that he is a good person who has been dealing with mental health issues.
Offering a possible explanation for his apparent involvement with the rice cookers, she said Griffin has a habit of picking up items in one place and putting them down in another.
“Whether it’s tools or a fishing pole or something like that, like he’ll pick up one thing and leave it there and then pick up another and then leave it there, and I’ve watched him do stuff like that a bunch of times,” she told the station, WSAZ-TV.
It wasn’t immediately known whether Griffin had a lawyer representing him in New York. No charges have been announced.
New York City police said security cameras captured a man pulling the cookers out of a shopping cart and placing them in the Fulton Street subway station near the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.
A third cooker of the same make, year and model was found about 2 miles away on a sidewalk in the Chelsea neighborhood, prompting another police investigation.
Police stressed at a news conference Friday that it wasn’t clear whether the man was trying to frighten people or merely throwing the objects away.
“I would stop very short of calling him a suspect,” said John Miller, the New York Police Department’s top counter-terrorism official.
“It is possible that somebody put out a bunch of items in the trash today and this guy picked them up and then discarded them, or it’s possible that this was an intentional act.”
Police tracked Griffin down about 13 hours after releasing a flier asking people to help identify him. Social media posts from the department described him as a person of interest who was wanted for questioning. The Logan County Sheriff ’s Department said it assisted an FBI task force by speaking with Griffin’s relatives in hopes of obtaining his possible location.