It likely took less than 10 minutes to rent the deadly weapon of choice in Wednesday’s lower Manhattan rampage
Walk into a Home Depot, show a clerk your driver’s license and proof of auto insurance, then hand over a credit card for a $50 deposit, and you can ride away in a big flatbed rental truck.
That’s what a colleague and I each managed to do on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after a man with a Paterson address allegedly did just that at the Passaic Home Depot, then crossed the Hudson and proceeded to collide with pedestrians, cyclists and a school bus on and near a lower Manhattan bike path.
In the aftermath of eight deaths and a dozen injuries, it’s unclear how long it took this alleged ISIS terrorist to manage this simple Home Depot transaction. But it took me just six minutes at The Home Depot’s Paterson store, and it took reporter Ricardo Kaulessar just 10 minutes at its Lodi store.
“A simple process, really,” said Ricardo. “It was easy, so easy. They didn’t even ask me what I needed the truck for.”
Me, too. No questions in Paterson. Home Depot will even give back about half your $50 (less $19.95 and fees) if you return the truck with a full tank of gas within 75 minutes.
Too easy?
This relative ease — far more pleasant than standing in a Motor Vehicle Commission line, but not quite as smooth as the E-ZPass lanes at most Garden State Parkway tollbooths — surprised him.
“I asked the clerk if they’d given any thought to suspending rentals for the rest of the week because of what happened in New York, and she said they had,” Ricardo recalled.
Apparently, that plan was abandoned because rental clerks in both stores seemed busy Wednesday renting vehicles and other necessities. Drain snares, not trucks, are the most popular item, said the Paterson clerk. She only shrugged and sighed when I mentioned the alleged Paterson truck-terrorist.
An unpopular tactic?
And if government made it tougher to rent one for just an hour or so, would the American people stand for it?
Ricardo and I had nothing to haul but our laptops and smartphones, so we invested some time in asking a few Home Depot customers about that as they went in and out of the Lodi store.
“I told my wife,” said Philomeno Mustig.”’How do you rent a truck to somebody who [looks] so suspicious with a beard, [because of his] beard and name?”
“They should be asked, ‘For what purpose are they going to use that truck?’ ” said Ralph Zisa. But the Englewood Cliffs shopper also conceded that applicants could always lie, and after all, Zisa added, “you can’t un-qualify people who are legitimate.”
Living in a free country exposes people to obvious risks, said a Pennsylvania shopper who wouldn’t expose much more to me than his middle name — Bobby — when asked to identify himself. People who live in a democracy give up something valuable if they don’t accept some risk, Bobby insisted.
“You don’t wanna stop these terrorists from letting us do what we gotta do,” he added.
A man from Bogota agreed.
“If you have a license, you should be able to rent a truck,” said Steve Del Maestro. “You can say there’s a terrorist issue involved in anything we do. So what are you gonna do?”
Regular readers chimed in by e-mail, too. If restrictions are added to truck rentals, Tim Buchanan wondered — tongue in cheek — if SUV purchases should be restricted, too.
“A Chevy Suburban weighs almost as much as the truck in question,” noted the Wyckoff reader. “With tinted windows, an SUV could be filled with bomb material hard to detect.”
Bollards on bike paths?
Might there be other solutions such as protective bollards on the bike path where the speeding rental mowed down unsuspecting cyclists and pedestrians? Traditional safety precautions suggest otherwise, said Tim.
“Consider that you might need an ambulance or a police car to help you by skipping a traffic jam on that bike path,” he said.
John Fisher seemed downhearted.
“The old America is gone,” wrote the Paramus reader. “If they can’t rent a vehicle, they’ll steal one.”
“If this animal had not purchased any building materials, why was he allowed to rent a truck?” asked Saddle Brook’s Tom Sullivan.
The answer is simple enough: The purchase requirement was removed several years ago. And it’s unlikely that a small purchase requirement would have discouraged someone intent on murder.