$200,000 bail ordered for suspect in rice cooker case
Larry Kenton Griffin was charged with the placing of a false bomb, police say. Credit: AFP / Getty Images / NYPD
A homeless man from West Virginia accused of placing three rice cookers around Manhattan during Friday’s morning rush hour was ordered held on $200,000 bail at his arraignment Saturday.
Larry Kenton Griffin II, of Bruno, West Virginia, is scheduled to return to New York Criminal Court on Friday.
The NYPD said Griffin, 26, was charged with the placing of a false bomb. He was taken into police custody just after midnight Saturday in the Bronx, a day after he was seen in surveillance video at Manhattan's Fulton Street subway station holding one of the objects police identified as rice cookers.
On Friday morning, two cookers were found in a lower Manhattan subway station, along with a third one a short time later on the street near 16th Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. Police determined none of the cookers was a bomb.
Surveillance video from the downtown scene — at the Fulton Street Station in the Financial District — shows that each "hoax device" was left on the station platform by the man now identified by the NYPD as Griffin.
A West Virginia sheriff's department said Griffin had a criminal history in the state.
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