Port Authority police supervisor Lt. James O'Neill reportedly ordered a PATH train with a suspicious package proceed from Jersey City to the World Trade Center, even though a bomb-sniffing K9 unit was just minutes away from the station. In an exclusive, the Post reports that passengers were evacuated from the train at Exchange Place just before 8 p.m. on Wednesday after a "suspicious box" was spotted. But despite protestations from subordinates, O'Neill reportedly cleared the train for departure before the bomb squad arrived—and sources say he made the call from his desk at Journal Square, three miles from the bomb scare.
"It was a clear dereliction of duty," one police source tells the tabloid. If so, it wouldn't have been the first time for O'Neill, who was reprimanded just last year for letting a PATH train proceed despite a suspicious package report, according to the Post's sources. We've contacted the Port Authority to try and get confirmation on all this (because we all know you've got to take the Post's sources with a grain of salt) but for now it seems that O'Neill could find himself... reprimanded again! His latest SNAFU came to light because K-9 cop Salvatore LoBrutto—who finally inspected the train only after it arrived at the WTC—wrote a letter to top Port Authority officials blasting O'Neill.
Fortunately for O'Neill (and all of us), the suspicious package was not a bomb that blew up the Hudson River tunnel, but rather a toy helicopter in a box. Still, it's a chilling incident nonetheless, especially since terrorists have eyed the tunnel as a target. And it comes less than a month after a Jersey man managed to walk through the tunnel from Manhattan without being noticed until he emerged in Jersey City. By the way, it wasn't a Port Authority cop or security guard who spotted him, but a Port Authority contractor.
