SWAMPSCOTT — A middle-school student had the ends of two of his fingers blown off yesterday by a homemade bomb that went off inside his Melvin Avenue home, authorities said.
The victim's brother said rescue workers could find only one of the fingertips.
The 13-year-old victim, identified by family and neighbors as Joel Surette, was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston by ambulance.
"First, he was screaming for five minutes," said his brother, Michael, 17, "He said, 'I can't believe I blew off my fingers.'"
Joanne Schumann, who lives two houses from the Surettes, was eating dinner with her family at 5:10 p.m. She didn't hear an explosion but saw Joel come out of the home with his arm covered in blood.
"He was white as a sheet," Schumann said. "He sat down in front of his house."
Michael Surette said he called 911 when he heard the bomb his brother made go off inside their home. He said the bomb contained gunpowder from about 100 toy caps that was placed inside a cardboard container with duct tape wrapped around it.
The brother added that the tip of the middle and ring fingers were blown off, and the bone was exposed on one of them.
Police said the 13-year-old was the only one hurt in the explosion and said his injury is not life-threatening.
Police had been called to the same part of town, just steps from the Lynn line, on Saturday for a report of a loud explosion.
That explosion set off car alarms, but police could not find the person responsible.
"Investigators are determining if the same person was responsible for each explosion and the possibility of criminal charges," a press release from the Swampscott police stated.
Police treated the home as a crime scene and spent almost two hours inside collecting evidence from the house and from the garbage cans at the side of the dwelling.
At 7 p.m., Detectives James Schultz and Ted Delano walked out of the home with a number of brown paper bags and left the scene. Assisting Swampscott detectives was a trooper from the state police hazardous device unit. The Swampscott Fire Department and Action Ambulance were also at the scene.
This isn't the first time local police have dealt with the premature explosion of homemade bombs made by teenagers.
In March 2007, a Swampscott High School freshman suffered burns to his face when a bomb he made using instructions he found on the Internet went off. That bomb was made with common household products.
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