$500,000 bail for courthouse bomb suspect

Bail was set at $500,000 Wednesday for a woman charged with carrying a bomb into the Spokane County Courthouse Annex.

District Court Judge Sara Derr found probable cause Wednesday to hold Sylvia Ceniceros, 35, on suspicion of unlawful possession of an explosive device.

Derr said the half-million-dollar bail was appropriate because authorities were unable to verify information Ceniceros provided about herself.

Ceniceros claimed she was unemployed, homeless and had been living with various friends when she was arrested Tuesday morning at the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Michael Price.

Meanwhile, County Commissioner Mark Richard said county officials plan a “little summit” to review Tuesday’s incident.

“The ultimate goal was achieved, that’s for sure,” Richard said. “Nobody was hurt.”

But he hopes to improve communications and evacuation procedures. There was some confusion in the evacuation, Richard said.

“It appears there might be a learning experience there,” he said.

He cited uncertainty about which offices to evacuate, whether to allow some employees to return to their offices and what role security screeners and others should play in the partial evacuation.

Also, Richard said, some employees began “trickling back” into evacuated offices so they could watch the controlled explosion that neutralized the bomb.

Court documents indicate private security officers who screen courthouse visitors were looking for a knife when they searched Ceniceros’ backpack about 8:20 a.m. Tuesday. When they found a suspicious object, they didn’t know it was a bomb.

Daniela Georgescu, an Olympic Security employee, said the knife showed up when Ceniceros’ backpack was scanned, but the bomb wasn’t recognizable because it contained no metal.

Georgescu said her co-worker, Leanne Miller, searched the backpack for the knife. In addition to the knife, Miller found an electric soldering iron and a cigar-shaped object that was 5 to 7 inches long, about an inch in diameter, and resembled a blackjack or a baton, Georgescu said.

She said the suspicious object was soft, light and wrapped with black electrical tape.

Miller and Georgescu routinely impounded the unknown object, the soldering iron and the knife, and had Ceniceros sign a log so she could retrieve them on her way out. They scanned the backpack again, returned it and allowed Ceniceros to enter the courthouse, through the annex.

Then Georgescu and Miller summoned sheriff’s Deputy Steve Martone, who discovered that the suspicious object was a bomb when he pulled a string from the middle of it and “silver-gray powder” spilled onto his hand.

Martone placed the device behind a shrub, next to a concrete retaining wall, in the walkway between the courthouse annex and the Public Safety Building – a short distance from the screening station where it was found. Other officers helped evacuate the buildings and used a small explosive charge to detonate the bomb harmlessly.

Martone and Miller found Ceniceros in Price’s courtroom on the third floor of the main courtroom and called a Spokane police officer to arrest her. Officials said Ceniceros apparently had gone to watch someone else’s preliminary hearing on closed-circuit television, but they didn’t know whose.

Ceniceros declined in a jailhouse interview Tuesday to say whose hearing she went to see. She said she didn’t know she had a bomb in her backpack and had no idea how one could have gotten there.

After her arrest, Ceniceros was charged with violating her conditions of release in a forgery case.

Ceniceros had been enrolled in a diversion program for first offenders, in which the forgery charge was to be dismissed if she satisfied court requirements and kept out of trouble.

If a judge finds Ceniceros failed the program, she may be convicted on prosecution evidence she has admitted is correct.