January 16, 2018 Return fire

It was just after 2:00 AM when the windows of Leonard Clump’s 27th floor law offices exploded out into the night, showering the streets below with glass and various fragments of desks, office chairs, and legal documents. Even the cleaning staff had gone home by this point, so nobody was harmed. Firefighters arrived at the scene within twenty minutes and police were investigating the next morning.

Len Clump himself was on CNN and MSNBC the next day denouncing the attack as obviously the act of a white supremacist seeking revenge on his persecuted black clients. “From Emmett Till to Rodney King to Treyvon Martin, we’ve faced senseless violence and hatred from the white man, and we’ve fought it with nothing but our own intelligence and determination. We will continue that fight.” It was in the news for two weeks, but then, as there were few new developments, faded away.

The Tallahassee police devoted all the detectives they could spare to the case, knowing that any misstep was likely to bring national attention. They had brief video of a suspect who may have planted the bomb, but weren’t able to identify anyone. The forensics lab was similarly stumped. The bomb, they said, appeared to have been deliberately constructed to destroy almost all of its primary components. Analyzing the explosives residue, they were able to track it to a package which was delivered to a post office box in Idaho over a year ago, and found nothing more.

So the event dropped out of the public eye. Apart from a few blogs and independent commentators, nobody thought much about it . . . until Clump died in an apparent car-jacking.

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