‘I’M A Victim Too’ Still In The Hospital For Burns, Accused Subway Bomber Edward Leary Grapples With Accusations That He’s The ‘Monster Of New York’
“Did you plant a bomb on the Downtown No. 4 train on December 21?”
“No, I did not.”
“Do you remember going into the subway that day?”
“Yes.”
“Did you carry a bomb with you?”
“No, I did not.”
These were the answers and the adamant defense of accused subway bomber Edward Leary, as he spoke publicly for the first time from his hospital room in a telephone interview with the Daily News.
So far Leary is charged with attempted murder and assault in the firebombing that left 48 people, including himself, injured in a subterranean tableau of horror.
Late last week, one of the victims, Winfield Edey, 60, had worsened to extremely critical condition with burns covering 60 percent of his body. If he dies, Leary will be charged with murder.
Leary will be accused of transporting the bomb across state lines from his Scotch Plains, N.J., home.
“Did you carry a bag down into the subway?”
“No,” Leary said, his voice faint, still medicated for the burns over 40 percent of his body. “When I got on the train I saw a bag. It was right on the floor inside the door. I didn’t see what was in the bag but it was smelly in there.”
“Did you look in the bag?”
“No, as a matter of fact I nudged it with my toe. I think I told someone it looked like chicken soup in there. I really only have a visual memory of what happened.”
Leary thought for a moment, trying to recount exactly what happened when the bomb went off.
“The explosion made a surprisingly small amount of noise,” he said. “I remember fire and panic but no pain. Absolutely no pain. Just shock, horror, people rolling around on the platform. I also remember an awful lot of brave people beating their coats trying to die people out. They died out my flames too. Then I remember that all I wanted to do was call my wife. She is a medical person, a nurse. I needed to get to her at that moment. I would have walked to New Jersey to get to her …”
How does he feel about all this right now?
“Physically, I’m in pain,” he said. “But mentally, emotionally I feel really bad, I feel very low.”
How does it feel to lie there each day knowing the law and the press has painted him as the Monster of New York?
“I haven’t sorted all of that out yet,” Leary said. “I haven’t read any of the papers. I know what they are saying because people have told me. But they’re wrong. I have a TV but I don’t watch it. I’m not a TV kind of person. Mostly what I think about is all these people here in the hospital. All the misery. I feel sympathy for them, because I am a victim too.”
Does he know anything at all about bomb making?
“No,” he said. “But I have an engineering degree. So if you gave me $100,000 and three months, I guess I could come up with something. But I never did this.”
Eleven months before the firebombing, Leary had been laid off by Merrill Lynch, where he worked as a computer systems architect. He was asked if he had any uncontrollable rage that grew out of being a 49-year-old man suddenly out of work.
“No, maybe the day I was laid off I was in a four-letterwordy kind of mood,” he said. “But there are lots of people my age out of work. And there are plenty of jobs out there. I had no rage. No financial desperation. We got by, my wife made a decent buck. We were carrying on. I wasn’t that desperate.”
What about the extortion notes that the authorities claim they found in his home?
“I don’t know anything about something like that,” Leary claimed. “I never wrote any such letters. For a little while, I thought I could be a writer so I wrote outlines for some novels. Thriller novels. But I couldn’t hear any dialogue.”
“Do you think you were capable of trying to turn that fiction into real life?”
“No, no, no,” Leary said. “No, I’m positive I didn’t do this.”
Leary said he drove from New Jersey on the morning of Dec. 21 and parked his car in Brooklyn.
“I was going to see a headhunter in Manhattan with my resume,” he said. “I parked at a meter in Brooklyn to save the parking fee in Manhattan. I was hoping I could get to Manhattan and back on the subway before the meter ran out. I parked near my son’s old school downtown.”
How does he feel as a father, knowing his 9-year-old must deal with his dad being accused of such a monstrous crime?
“This is the most painful part of all,” Leary said after a long pause, his voice cracking. “I haven’t spoken to him or seen him yet. What I have to say to him I don’t want to say in a newspaper.”
Does Leary understand the full gravity of what he’s charged with? And that he could face the death penalty?
“The only thing I choose to think about is that I didn’t do it,” he said. “That’s what gets me through each day. All I can do is wait for trial so that my lawyer, Stephen Murphy, can prove me innocent.”
Leary was asked how the events of Dec. 21 changed his life.
“You can’t help but change spiritually,” he said. “I’m forever changed. I can never go back to be the old Ed Leary I used to be. It bothers me that people think I did this. I don’t know if this is amazing or surreal or just a nightmare. Mostly what I think about is all these people, all the misery that’s been caused. I’m a victim too. I feel like a victim twice. Once of the flames and now this. But my only message to the people of New York is that I didn’t do this.”