Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Suspect dead, 4 hurt in Dalton law-firm explosion

By MARCUS K. GARNER - (Atlanta Journal Constitution)

Dalton — A 78-year-old man who may have been fed up with the legal system ignited an explosion at a law office in downtown Dalton on Friday morning. The blast killed him and injured four inside the office, one a lawyer who suffered serious burns.

State and federal police Friday evening were searching the law firm building and an SUV loaded with gasoline, propane and natural gas, which the man had tried unsuccessfully to ram into the building. Had he succeeded, Dalton police said, the damage and injuries could have been much worse.

Lloyd Sylvester Cantrell, 78, had a land dispute with one of the lawyers at the firm McCamy, Phillips, Tuggle and Fordham in the small town in northeast Georgia,, authorities said. They believe he showed up Friday morning to settle a score.

An attorney at the firm who left the office just before the blast said employees told him they saw a man trying to drive his vehicle into the building and locked the doors. Police were called to the law offices on West Crawford Street around 10 a.m., Frazier said.

“He tried to ram his SUV into the building,” Bruce Frazier, Dalton police PIO said of Cantrell. “But he couldn’t get in” so he apparently got out of the truck and walked around to the back of the building.

Officers arrived on the scene in time to see an explosion in the back of the brick building, Frazier said. It wasn’t immediately clear whether he was carrying the explosives or had them hidden inside the building.

Of the four injured in the office, two were not badly hurt, a third was taken to a nearby hospital, and a fourth, lawyer James Phillips, was airlifted to the Joseph M. Still Burn Center in Augusta, hospital officials said.

Inside Cantrell’s SUV, “There are propane tanks, gasoline containers and natural gas containers,” Frazier said. Attorney Robert Smalley, a lawyer at the firm, left 15 to 20 minutes before the blast but turned back when he received phone calls about it.

Aside from Phillips, Smalley identified those injured as his assistant, Teresa Stinnett, and two clients. Smalley said Stinnett has a shoulder injury but is going to be OK.

“We’ll take today with our families and try to regroup,” Smalley said. “Our thoughts right now are with the injured and their families.”

Early Friday evening, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms was using a robot to sift through debris at the law office and inside the SUV.

Georgia Bureau of Investigations agents were at Cantrell’s home at 1180 Beaverdale Road in nearby Varnell to look for more bomb-making material. The home, which is about 14 miles from Dalton, is being considered a secondary crime scene.

“Our job is to render any explosives that have not exploded safe,” GBI spokesman John Bankhead said.

Susan Deneise Crowder, who identified herself as Cantrell’s daughter, told the Dalton Daily Citizen that she had been questioned twice by detectives Friday.

Investigators weren’t sure what material caused the explosion, but after the initial fire was out, a second fiire began, slowing their search of the law building.

“They had to wait until the fire department could put out the fire,” Bankhead said of the GBI’s search for more explosives.

City Park School, across the street from the law firm, was put on lockdown after the incident, Frazier said. The elementary school was eventually evacuated, with students being sent to a nearby church to be released to their parents, he said.

Cantrell’s body will be returned to the GBI’s crime lab in Decatur for an autopsy, Frazier said.

The eight-lawyer firm, founded in 1932, works out of a two-story, colonial-style house. Police cordoned off the block and shut down a post office near the law firm, which specializes in personal injury and wrongful death cases, according to its Web site.

Students at an elementary school across the street were evacuated to a nearby church.