Kansas Crisis Pregnancy Center Receives Bomb Threat
by Karla Dial
LifeNews.com Staff Writer
December 8, 2003
Wichita, KS (LifeNews.com) — The woman who called Choices Medical Clinic in Wichita late on the night of December 3 was seriously lacking in Christmas cheer.
Choices is a pregnancy resource center located next door to the abortion facility of George Tiller, one of the few late-term abortionists in the country. Choices keeps its hotline open for emergency calls 18 hours a day. So when the phone rang at 11 p.m., the staffer on duty didn’t find it unusual — until the caller spoke.
"She said,’‘You sucked the life out of my daughter, and I’m going to blow your (expletive deleted) clinic up,’ " Medical Director Tim Weisner said. "Then she hung up."
Weisner reported the incident to the Wichita Police Department the first thing Dec. 4, but there was little to be done: The woman making the threat had call blocking, so her number couldn’t be traced. Moreover, he wasn’t even sure if the threat was meant for Choices, or if the caller had reached them by mistake while trying to threaten Tiller.
"I wasn’t taking it too seriously," he said. "It was something she said she was going to do, not like she had planted something on the premises."
The threat was the first Choices has received since opening its doors five years ago.
Capt. Darrell Haynes, who oversees the Wichita Police Department’s bomb squad unit, told LifeNews.com that it’s standard procedure not to investigate phone threats.
"In a year, we have thousands of phone threats that don’t rise to any kind of situation," he said. But the unit always checks out suspicious packages.
Haynes himself was on hand a few months ago when one such package landed on Tiller’s doorstep. Weisner said the bomb squad first told the Choices Medical Clinic staff they needed to evacuate the building, then told them they would be OK if they just stayed on the side away from Tiller’s clinic.
When the squad detonated the package, it turned out to be a package of LifeSavers candy, left as a thank-you gift for Tiller and his staff.
"There was a real nice spearmint essence in the air," Haynes said.
"LifeSavers," Weisner commented. "How ironic."
