INDEPENDENCE, Mo. — The Independence bomb squad removed an improvised explosive device from an apartment complex Monday night.
Officers were called to the Independence Ridge Apartments early Monday evening.
When the maintenance crew showed up around 5 a.m. to get rid of the trash, they found a suspicious device and called the police.
Officers evacuated that building and asked residents in other buildings to stay inside and away from windows.
“I was in the house what was going on it was like kind of, 'Stay in the house. We can’t tell you what’s going on right now,'” Tiffany Perry, a neighbor said.
Robert Foster has been doing some carpentry work for the apartment complex. He told 41 Action News in his 65 years on the job, this is a first.
Foster spent the better part of Monday working on apartment number eight, at the time nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
“I was working on the outside that’s where all the pile of trash was,” Foster said.
Independence police said around 11 p.m., the device was safely removed from the apartment complex by the department's Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit and destroyed at an off-site location.
The scene was determined to be safe, and residents were allowed back into their apartments.
Independence police determined the suspicious device was an IED made of consumer-grade fireworks with added shrapnel.
Bryan Martinez and his family live in the apartment directly below.
“Nobody knew about it — a good thing that nothing horrible happened,” Martinez said.
He said the former tenant in apartment eight kept to himself and had recently been evicted.
“It was just surprising to know that there were explosives and that anything could have happened at anytime,” Martinez said.
Police are still working to find the person who built the explosive device so their investigation continues.
No one was injured.
