Death Of A Pizza Man

By David E. Thigpen/Erie Sunday, Sept. 07, 2003
    • Brian Wells' goals in life didn't seem to extend much beyond finding the address for his next pizza delivery. He was a solitary man whose only regular houseguest was his mom, with whom he shared Sunday steak dinners. He was so reluctant about calling attention to himself that he had the hubcaps removed from his car because they were too flashy. He cared for three cats that he simply called Kitty. And every morning for five years, as regular as clock hands, he waved the same unsmiling hello to the clerks in the health-food shop next to Mama Mia's, the pizzeria that employed him.

    So, to the small circle of people who knew Wells, it came as a shock when the reticent and retiring 46-year-old appeared at a teller's window in a bank near Erie, Pa., demanded money and lifted his shirt to reveal a bomb locked around his neck. Wells fled but was stopped and pulled from his car seconds later by passing state troopers alerted by 911 callers in the bank. As he sat handcuffed and cross-legged on the ground, Wells warned troopers there was a bomb beneath his T shirt and pleaded for help in getting it off. Officers backed off to summon the bomb squad, and as minutes ticked away, he became increasingly agitated and desperate. "I don't have a lot of time," he said. "It's gonna go off." And then, referring to a mysterious "he," Wells added, "He pulled a key out and started a timer. I heard the thing ticking when he did it." Wells never said who "he" was. Moments after that there came a sharp blast, and Wells slumped over, dead.


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    Police later recovered a bag of cash, a robbery note and a homemade zip gun from his car, but Wells' puzzling statements left investigators pondering three possible scenarios: Wells was forced into a crime and made its only victim; he was an accomplice, or he acted alone. To many of those who knew him, the last two theories seemed impossible.

    Wells worked for much of the last dozen years of his life as a pizza-delivery man in and around Erie, a blue-collar town of 100,000 midway between Cleveland, Ohio, and Buffalo, N.Y. One of seven children, Wells was a high school dropout. He was a withdrawn but likable man, friends say, a guy who wore a T shirt and jeans nearly every day. He often passed the time between deliveries thumbing through newspapers. "I don't believe he had the mentality to build a bomb," says Mark Tupek, who hired Wells to deliver pies at a local pizza shop several years ago. Tupek remembers that Wells seemed to have a strong sense of right and wrong: "I used to tell him to help himself to food in the shop if he got hungry, but he never, ever touched it. He said it wasn't his." Nor was he angling for a better life. "He never talked about any dreams or big plans," says Tupek. "He was just a homebody. I took him to a bar one night after work, and he just froze on his barstool. He didn't like to go out."

    Wells lived alone in a small rented white A-frame house, where he did little but tend to his cats, watch rented movies and, in the winter, help his neighbors shovel snow. His take-home pay was usually only a few hundred dollars a week, but the week he died, he made his last regular payment on a loan extended by a friend to help him buy the Geo Metro he drove. He played the lottery regularly and once collected a $250 payout, which he talked about for weeks. A co-worker, Robert Slayton, recalls that Wells' only vice seemed to be liquor: "He got off work at 9, and usually at 8 he'd ask if it was O.K. to make a run to the store to get a bottle to take home with him. But if he got a call, he'd deliver a pizza wherever, no matter how far." He never missed a day of work.

    That kind of diligence may be a clue to what transpired on his final day. At Mama Mia's, Wells received a call around 2 p.m. for two sausage pies to be delivered to an address about two miles away. The delivery address turned out to be on a pitted dirt road leading into secluded woods and finally to an array of satellite-TV dishes. What happened in the subsequent few minutes is under investigation, but police know Wells turned up at a nearby PNC Bank branch at 2:40, waited in line and presented a teller with a note demanding $250,000. Another note, found later in his car, reportedly instructed him to deliver the money to three locations. Police say they are comparing the note with Wells' handwriting. But Tupek says, "Brian was frail. If someone grabbed him and put that thing on him, he wouldn't put up a fight."

    And that's the message he seemed desperate to send in the last minutes of his life. As he sat on the ground, waiting for the bomb squad to arrive, one of the last things Wells could be heard saying was, "It's not me. I didn't do it."