The LaGuardia Airport Bombing Of 1975

 From Slate: "The Forgotten Bombing of LaGuardia Airport." 6:30 p.m. on Dec. 29, 1975, a bomb left in a rented locker at New York's LaGuardia Airport detonated with the power of 25 sticks of dynamite. 

    ... A 12-foot-wide hole was torn in the 8-inch-thick concrete ceiling. A football field’s length of plateglass windows were blown out. Pieces of red lockers littered the parking lot. Water geysered from the busted pipes.

    All told, an estimated 75 people were injured, and 11—including Stamey, Patterson, Bull, and Musicaro—died as a result of the blast. The violence was such that, within minutes, 175 pints of blood were immediately shipped to city hospitals from the bank on Amsterdam Avenue. Corpses sat on-site in pine boxes before transport to the medical examiner’s office. There was an account of a human head resting on a window ledge, and puddles of blood soaking the island next to the parking lot. “The explosion ripped upwards and outwards,” reported CBS News’ Ike Pappas the next evening, with the deceased “caught in the crossfire of glass and metal that sheared off limbs and tore through bodies.”

    It was, recalled the EMS dispatcher on duty that night in Queens, “a horror.”

The investigation that followed was the largest investigation run by the NYPD at that time, augmented by hundreds of agents from the FBI's New York field office and agents from the ATF. Although there was some suspicion cast on a Croat named Zvonko Bušić, his wife, Julienne, who were involved in a hijacking and bomb incident in 1976, investigators concluded that they were not involved in the 1975 bombing. The case is still unsolved today.

    Oddly, however, the incident has largely been forgotten. According to the author of the article:

    Now, more than half a century later, it’s as if the bombing never happened. After extensive research, I could not find so much as a marker, on-site or elsewhere, commemorating the lives lost. When I tell people about it—even those old enough to have lived through the event—I’m greeted with shock that such violence could escape their memory. New Yorkers have a shared consciousness; talk to someone who’s lived here long enough, and they’ll tell you stories about Etan Patz’s disappearance or David Berkowitz’s murder spree. The LaGuardia bombing isn’t part of our collective memory.

    But it ought to be. In an effort to reconstruct the story of what happened that winter night, I’ve spoken to people close to the event, including survivors, family members of victims, and investigators. No one had contacted them about the bombing for decades, including the investigating agencies. When I began leaving messages for them, one survivor wondered if the phone call was a prank. 

 It hasn't been completely forgotten. CBS posted original new footage of the story to YouTube about 6 months ago. And in December 2025, A&E published an article entitled, "What It Would Take to Figure Out Who Committed the LaGuardia Airport Bombing After 50 Years."