14 DAY TRIAL // US authorities had to temporarily close a portion of Interstate 70 between Grain Valley and Oak Grove in Missouri early on Monday morning after a fully clothed mannequin wearing a President Barack Obama mask was spotted hanging from a bridge overpass.
According to Fox 4 News, police was notified about the dummy hanging from the Lefholz Bridge at about 5:30 a.m. The traffic in the area was disrupted for several minutes while the Jackson County Sheriff’s office removed the item from the overpass.
While doing so, officers noticed something that appeared to be an explosive device attached to the mannequin, so they also called The Independence police bomb unit to examine the suspicious Obama effigy.
Using a robot, the bomb squad took the dummy to a nearby field where they x-rayed it for possible explosives.
“The item that we had, we thought possibly could have been explosive, so we went ahead and shut down I-70 is both directions to ensure that if it was explosive there was nothing that was going to cause a hazard to any passerbys, and once we removed that from the scene we opened up I-70 almost immediately,” Sergeant Ronda Montgomery told Fox 4 News.
As it turns out, no explosives were found, but the Secret Services are now investigating who left the item on the bridge and how long it had been there. Montgomery mentioned that a rope was used to attach the mannequin to the bridge, but authorities refused to release other specific details, saying that the incident was still under investigation.
“We are talking with neighbors and canvassing the neighborhood. We are putting the pieces of the puzzle together,” she said.
Former FBI agent Jeff Lanza said that although for the moment, the motivation behind this incident is not known, law enforcement officials are not going to take it lightly because any threat against the president is a serious matter.
“Most of those things are not going to be serious, but you can’t take a chance, so what they’ll try to do is figure out who put it there, and if they can trace it back to the person responsible then they can see if it’s a credible threat or not,” Lanza said.
When similar cases occurred in the past, people who hang Obama effigies across the nation have not been charged with a crime because of free speech protections.