Shoppers at the Wal-Mart store in Skowhegan said they were aware of bomb threats made Saturday night, but that wasn’t going to stop them from shopping on Sunday.
“You can’t let fear keep you home,” Molly Staples of Moscow said exiting the store with her husband and three small children.
Amber Richardson of Canaan agreed Sunday, saying she was not worried about shopping at Wal-Mart.
“I don’t let things scare me,” she said. “I don’t let it affect me as much as possible. It didn’t really bother me. I was kind of shocked to hear about it. I was just buying groceries today — the essentials and a little bit of Christmas shopping.”
Stores reported receiving “generic voice-automated bomb threat” messages beginning at about 7:30 p.m. Saturday, according to published reports.
Police said Sunday that the bomb scares at Wal-Mart stores in Maine Saturday night were taken very seriously. The threats were similar to threats reported in several other states.
There were no bombs and no reports of threats on Sunday.
Wal-Mart stores all over Maine, including Waterville, Skowhegan and Palmyra, were targeted. All of the stores were open for business Sunday.
“It definitely was taken seriously,” said James Ross, chief deputy at the Somerset County Sheriff’s Department. “We had two deputies respond to Palmyra, and one deputy assisted at Skowhegan.”
The Palmyra store was briefly evacuated while deputies and fire personnel conducted a search of the store with Wal-Mart personnel, Ross said Sunday.
“When nothing was found, Wal-Mart made the decision to reopen,” he said. “As events unfolded, we learned that a number of other Wal-Marts in the state had received the exact same threat. The sheriff’s office will be ready to assist other agencies if leads develop.”
The Skowhegan store also was evacuated briefly.
“The announcement said, ‘All employees and assistants please exit the building.’ We didn’t know what was happening until we got out here, and somebody told us that it was a bomb,” a store worker herding shopping carts said Sunday.
Wal-Mart spokesman Brian Nick told news outlets in Maine that the retailer’s 4,500 stores across the country often receive bomb threats around Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season.
A bomb threat was called in to the Palmyra store on Main Street at 7:45 p.m. Saturday, followed by a call to the Skowhegan Wal-Mart at Fairgrounds Market Place at 7:50 p.m. and to the Wal-Mart store at Waterville Commons Drive four minutes later at 7:54 p.m.
In Waterville, the call came in via a blocked telephone number, according to the police dispatch log. Police contacted the store manager and took a ride around the perimeter of the store. The building was searched by Wal-Mart staff and police officers, and the threat was found to be fake.
Houlton Police and Calais Police said similar threats came to their departments. There were threats to Wal-Mart stores in Biddeford, Windham and Scarborough.
Elsewhere in the United States, police in Horseheads, New York; Idaho Falls, Idaho; Rawlins, Wyoming; and Vidalia, Mississippi, also responded to similar threats.
Doug Harlow — 612-2367
Twitter:@Doug_Harlow
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