Homeless man Manuel Garcia charged with bomb hoax at federal courthouse

It’s hard to get worked up over “suspicious packages” any more. They almost always (thankfully) turn out to be a box full of fliers or a cooler of phone books.

Take the package at the Charles Evans Whittaker Federal Courthouse at 9th and Locust on Monday. A mesh cooler was found with a note referencing “C-4” and claiming it would detonate at 7 a.m., so the courthouse was evacuated. The bomb robot comes out, and finds a couple of Kansas City telephone books inside. Hey, there is a use for the phone book after all.

But that’ll get you charged in federal court. The feds think they’ve found their hoax bomber, charging a 66-year-old homeless man named Manuel Garcia with planting a hoax bomb outside of the courthouse and calling in a false bomb threat.