A 19-year-old tourist has lost his left leg after getting seriously injured as he stepped on what appeared to be a firework while strolling in the popular Central Park.
Connor Golden, who was visiting from Virginia, stepped on an explosive material that had been left behind as he was with walking in the park yesterday. A report in the New York Times said investigators believe the material was part of an “experiment with fireworks”.
Police officials, who declined to call the material a device, said they did not believe it was connected to terrorism.
“It is not unusual for the public to make or try to create homemade fireworks around the Fourth of July,” said John O’Connell, a deputy police chief for counter-terrorism with the New York Police Department.
The incident occurred just a day before the American Independence Day holiday on July 4, a time when the city is inundated with tourists from all across the world. Various firework displays are planned across the city as well as the country to commemorate the holiday.
After the explosion, Golden lay against a boulder with his left leg below the calf severely wounded. The NYT report said someone had tied a strip of blue fabric around his leg as a tourniquet before emergency workers carried him from the park on a stretcher.
Golden was taken to a nearby hospital and his condition was said to be serious but stable. The bizarre accident forced the amputation of Golden’s left leg below the knee.
Lieutenant Mark Torre, the commander of the Police Department’s bomb squad, said he believed Golden had encountered homemade fireworks that did not appear to be designed to explode from contact.
“Their goal is to make a loud noise,” Torre said, “maybe make a flash”.
The material, he said, could have been left behind days ago.
Posts on social media described the scene as grisly and said the victim has been left bloodied and maimed with the explosion.
Police also dismissed reports that authorities were shutting down the 843-acre Central Park as erroneous, but fear and anxiety had been stirred around the park.
“We are worried,” Giselle Brown, 42, said in the report as she sat on a bench on Fifth Avenue with relatives visiting from Nicaragua. “We want to know exactly what happened”.
Later on Sunday, a swath of the park remained cordoned off as investigators from the Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were still at work.
