ARSENAL FOUND IN MILL BASIN HOME

Upstairs room in the house on beautiful Mayfair Drive South was where gun cache and homemade bomb were discovered. Charles Rogers

By Charles Rogers

Police are still trying to find out why a Mill Basin resident was making a bomb before he died in his private den last Sunday. The small room was found also to have contained a number of handguns and an AK-47 assault rifle.

The discovery of the arsenal was sparked when Marie Lambert call-ed 911 to report that she returned from shopping at about 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 15 to find her husband, George, 46, unconscious in the room on the second floor of their house on Mayfair Drive South.

Police from the 63rd Precinct rushed to the scene with Emergency Medical Service personnel to discover Lambert slumped over his bed. There were no signs of foul play, police said, but the final cause of death will be determined by the city’s medical examiner’s office.

While the police were tending to the body, they looked around the room and found ten guns, including the rifle, and what appeared to be a fire extinguisher filled with gunpowder and with wires and a timing device attached. They immediately called for the NYPD bomb squad and, for safety purposes, evacuated the surrounding houses.

Bomb squad officers, wearing protective suits, wrapped the device in a metal blanket, put it in a special container on a trailer, and immediately took it to Rodman’s Neck Police Range in The Bronx to be examined and detonated, although they could not confirm the detonation.

Police sources said Mrs. Lambert told them she had not been allowed into the room in which the body was found “for months” and that he had been working on something, but she didn’t know what. Sources said he had been arrested on gun possession charges last August and was scheduled to go to trial this week for the offense.

Neighbors said they couldn’t believe what was found in the room.

“Everybody around here can understand a little bit about having the handguns maybe,” one man said, asking that his name not be released. “I don’t doubt you’d find a lot of that around. But everybody’s dumbfounded about the so-called bomb.”

The neighbor said the deceased man was not employed and suffered from a bad back “for a long time.”

“He was such a nice guy,” another man said. He too wanted to remain anonymous. “It wasn’t too long ago I saw him trying to help some people who had a flat tire near his house. Even with his bad back he was willing to help his neighbors. That’s the kind of guy he was.”

Another neighboring resident said he felt bad for the family.

“With all this business about the guns and the bomb and with all the cameras and the media, people are forgetting that Mrs. Lambert just lost a husband and her two beautiful daughters just lost their father. People are forgetting about compassion.”