Christmas Shopping Weekend

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December 21, 2003 by cryan.com

Around the Natick and Framingham section of Route 9, traffic looked like Highway 101 in California during the dot com boom. Most of the traffic congestion centered around Shopper's World and the Natick Mall.

The Solomon Pond mall had an bomb scare around 2pm on Saturday and evacuated a parking area in front of the mall. The Mall itself wasn't evacuated.

Bomb scare puts a crimp in shopping

Just before 2 p.m., authorities ordered shoppers back inside J.C. Penney's.

Parking rows 28 through 30 were cordoned off with yellow tape in front of the department store.

Fire officials learned of a suspicious item in the J.C. Penney's parking lot early yesterday afternoon while responding to another matter at the mall, said Deputy Chief Robert Rennie.

While the worries over the item turned out to be a false alarm, shoppers were barred from going to their cars and eventually ordered back in the store while Marlborough and Berlin fire crews called the State Police Bomb Squad to help investigate the suspicious device.