3 men who discovered bomb say they later lost jobs
Three cleanup workers who were hailed as heroes after finding a live bomb along the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade said they later lost their jobs after supervisors questioned their handling of the situation.
The men were employed by Labor Ready and working under contract for the Spokane Public Facilities District when they found a backpack containing the bomb about an hour before the scheduled start of the Jan. 17 parade.
They alerted police, who were able to defuse the device.
"For the first two days, basically all we did was get chewed out," worker Mark Steiner told Spokane television station KHQ. "We did this wrong. We did that wrong. I don't know what you consider calling 911 wrong after two minutes after we found it."
Steiner, Brandon Klaus and Sherman Welpton had been hired to perform cleanup work during the parade and noticed the backpack on an outdoor bench.
3 men who discovered bomb say they later lost jobs