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Shops at Riverside mall in Hackensack reopens after bomb threat

Riverside Square Mall

DECEMBER 12, 2015, 2:12 PM    LAST UPDATED: SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2015, 6:47 PM
BY JOHN C. ENSSLIN AND HANNAN ADELY
STAFF WRITERS |
THE RECORD

A false bomb threat led to the three-hour evacuation of The Shops at Riverside mall in Hackensack on the penultimate Saturday in the holiday shopping season.

As authorities investigated the threat — scrawled on a bathroom wall, graffiti-style — hundreds of jittery shoppers had to abandon their meals and purchases, and were forced out of the complex and into the parking lot, alongside mall workers.

Hackensack Police summoned the Bergen County bomb squad and ordered the evacuation after a security officer discovered the message written with a marker near a urinal in a lower-level men’s room at around 1 p.m., said Hackensack Police Capt. Timothy Lloyd.

Witnesses said several hundred customers and employees emptied out of the mall in an urgent but orderly fashion as both sound and light alarms went off.

A search by bomb-sniffing dogs and bomb-squad officers found no explosives and the mall — at the intersection of Route 4 and Hackensack Avenue — re-opened around 4 p.m., Lloyd said.

The evacuation also led police to divert traffic on Hackensack Avenue onto Route 4, said Anthony Cureton, a spokesman for the Bergen County Sheriff’s Office.

Some two hours into the evacuation, most people had cleared out of the area. On the grass at the outskirts of the complex’s parking lot, though, small groups of employees lingered waiting for their stores and restaurants to reopen. And some shoppers also stayed behind, forced to wait because, they said, authorities wouldn’t allow them to retrieve their vehicles from the mall’s multi-tiered parking garage before the all-clear was given.

https://www.northjersey.com/news/shops-at-riverside-mall-in-hackensack-reopens-after-bomb-threat-1.1472899

2 thoughts on “Shops at Riverside mall in Hackensack reopens after bomb threat

  1. The new normal.

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