Bomb threat at Starbucks? Big mistake...

San Francisco authorities struggled to explain Thursday how they concluded that an object left in a Starbucks bathroom was a bomb, when tests revealed it was nothing more than a flashlight with corroded batteries.

"This appeared, by itself, to be a bomb,'' said police spokesman Sgt. Neville Gittens. Gittens would not specify what about the device was so convincing, other than to say that all the people who saw it described it as a "tube-shaped cylinder with a fuse.''

The employee called police. Officers evacuated the store and an apartment building above it, and bomb squad officers used a high-power hose to blast the object with water.

They said a muffled noise that police heard when the water cannon hit the object, which they took to be an explosion, may have been the sound of a chemical reaction between the water and the corroded batteries.

The man who says he left the flashlight in the Starbucks, Ronald Schouten, 44, remains in custody in County Jail on unrelated matters. He told police he had found the flashlight on the street and thought it could be used for self-defense, but decided to leave it behind after using the restroom.

He was charged Thursday with burglary and is expected to be back in court today. After visiting the Starbucks, he allegedly went to a Circuit City and used the bag the coffeehouse given to him for the coffee grounds to shoplift a camera, prosecutors said.

Weird. Yet interesting. Article here.