A crazed, drunken homeless man heading to California for a reunion with his family set off mass panic at La Guardia Airport yesterday when he strolled in with a bogus bomb in his backpack attached to what looked like a triggering device in his hand.
Two heroic Port Authority police officers — thinking they had a suicide bomber on their hands — immediately tackled Scott McGann, 32, as he approached the security checkpoint at the airport’s main terminal at 5:30 a.m., authorities said.
As they wrestled him to the ground, the lunatic terrorist wannabe repeatedly clicked the trigger mechanism in his hand. Wires ran up his sleeves where they were connected to several taped-up batteries in his beige backpack designed to look like a bomb.
Officers Robert Keane and Thomas Sullivan frantically ripped the wires from McGann’s arms as hundreds of panicked travelers scrambled for safety.
When McGann — who reportedly is bipolar and has been living on the streets of New York since driving cross-country with his cat from California three years ago — pressed the trigger, “he closed his eyes” and never said a word, Keane told The Post.
“He really thought he had a bomb in there,” Keane said.
Thousands of stunned passengers, some herded off jets, were rushed to the exits and forced to wait for several hours on airport roadways and bridges.
Scores of flights were delayed or canceled here and around the country as a result.
McGann walked into Terminal C wearing dirty, ragged clothes and was acting “suspiciously,” police said.
He checked in at the United Airlines desk for a flight to Chicago with connections that would have brought him to Oakland, Calif.
When he moved on, the ticket agent called guards at the security checkpoint and warned that a “strange and suspicious” man wearing a fishing hat was headed their way.
Port Authority police also received two other calls about the man, with one person calling him “intoxicated.”
When check-in agents tried to stop him, he was “near catatonic and glassy-eyed,” Keane said. Then PA police spotted the bogus bomb and sprang into action.
After they subdued McGann, the NYPD Bomb Squad doused the bag with a high-powered water cannon, a method used to disarm real bombs.
Squad members found a few batteries and wires but no explosives, police said. Also in the bag was a drawing of a device that looked like the phony bomb he had constructed, sources said.
McGann was charged with placing a false bomb in a transportation facility and making terrorist threats, Queens DA Richard Brown said.
At a hearing last night, McGann appeared catatonic, refusing to answer a judge’s questions, and was ordered to undergo psychiatric testing.
The airport was reopened after 4½ hours, but turned into chaos as passengers flooded back in.
“People are fighting and people are cutting into lines,” Arthur Schwarz, of Flushing, Queens, who was scheduled to be on a flight to Toronto. “It’s textbook pandemonium.”
McGann’s mother, Margie Jones, from northern California told investigators her son had driven to New York City in 2006.
She had bought him the ticket to fly home for a family reunion, sources said. Another source said the mom was also hoping to get him mental-health treatment.
Described as “super-intelligent but socially dysfunctional,” McGann grew up near Sacramento, Calif., and lived briefly in Seattle. He ran a Web consulting business in San Leandro, Calif., as recently as 2004.
Just two months ago, McGann was arrested following a bizarre incident in which he wandered into the criminal courthouse at 346 Broadway in Manhattan, snatched a stack of papers from a lawyer’s hands and tried to run from the building.
McGann also has a 1992 arrest for carrying a gun to a high school. He has been arrested several times since arriving in New York, for quality-of-life crimes like unauthorized vending, sources said.
Additional reporting by Tom Namako, Janon Fisher, Murray Weiss, Larry Celona, Frank Rosario and Erin Calabrese