Norwood Police Officers Face Double Trouble-July1,1981

On Monday night between 9 and 10:30, Patrolman Steven Palmer and his partner, Patrolman Christopher Mullen, answered two potentially dangerous calls within an hour and a half. The first call was about a man with a gun on a motorcycle at the corner of Nahatan and Central streets. The man had the gun wrapped in a cloth hanging from his belt and claimed he had a permit for it. However, Palmer said it was unusual to see someone packing a gun in Norwood Center.

About an hour later, the two policemen received another call about a man who was in the office of Norwood Taxi at 635 Washington St with a stick of dynamite in his mouth. The man threatened to light what appeared to be a dynamite stick if anyone came near him. Palmer identified the man as Philip Arsenault Jr., a 41-year-old from Parker Stables Road in Dedham, who wanted the owner of the cab company to give him back pay he felt was owed to him.

Palmer said that Arsenault had been employed by the company and probably wasn’t holding a real stick of dynamite but rather a flare. Police sent the alleged dynamite to the state police laboratory in Boston for analysis. The man ignored pleas from the company owner and the dispatcher to drop the lighter but surrendered after an order from Mullen and was charged with possession of a bomb and assault with a dangerous weapon.

“I’ve never dealt with anything like that before,” Mullen said, adding that he tried to be firm with the man, remembering from his college psychology course that sometimes the presence of a uniform acts as a stabilizing force in certain situations. The whole episode was over in about half an hour.

Palmer commented, “In a town like this you don’t expect something like that to happen.”

Archival Note: This article has been dynamically reconstructed from the original public record print archives of the Patriot Ledger