BOMB MEANT FOR BLOODS
Package-blast landlord fights for life
The package had sat alongside the concrete stoop of a Queens two-family home for about a week before the landlord — a kind and generous man, 72 years old — made the fateful decision to bend down and look inside.
It was cylindrical, heavy and large, as if a cardboard can of Quaker Oats had doubled in size.
Someone had addressed it to a single name, “Max,” before tying it inside a clear plastic trash bag.
Friday, landlord George Wray untied the bag and pried open the top.
The cylinder exploded immediately, engulfing Wray’s head, arms, torso and legs in flames.
Now, as Wray fights for his life at Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow, LI, police are hunting for whoever put the bomb there — working to determine for whom it was meant, and why.
A police source told The Post Saturday the target is believed to be a Bloods gang member who lives at the Brookville property.
“It wasn’t supposed to be for him,” a detective at the scene said of Wray, who lives nearby with his wife.
Tenant Cornelius Freeman, 34, was asleep when the bomb went off at 4:15 p.m. Friday. He was awakened by firerighters banging on his door, shouting, “You gotta come out of the house!”
“When I came through the fence, my landlord was right there, on his knees,” Freeman said, pointing to the side of the stoop, which on Saturday was still blackened by explosives powder.
“It just looked like he just — like all the skin had come off him,” the shaken tenant said.
“It burned all his hair off his head.”
Even then, the landlord, who had once given Freeman $180 out of his pocket, was generous.
“He was asking me, ‘Is y’all alright? Y’all alright?’ ” Freeman remembered.
“That’s all he was saying. We should’ve been asking him, ‘Is you alright?’, right?”
Tenant Rol’Ans Innocent said the folks living in the home had unwittingly been moving the bomb around all week. One would put it in front of another’s door. Then it would be moved back. Ultimately, it wound up besides the stoop.
“I did lift it,” said Innocent, 45. “It was very heavy.”