IED caused car explosion Wednesday

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE)  Investigators believe an Improvised Explosive Device, or IED, is what caused an explosion inside a car at Coliseum Park Apartments in Fort Wayne early Wednesday morning.

Police were called to the 3900 block of Newport Avenue around 1:10 a.m. after getting reports of a loud explosion and a vehicle smoking in the parking lot of the apartment complex.

First responders arrived to discover a 1999 black Buick Regal was smoldering and completely destroyed.  Bomb technicians recovered the front windshield of the Buick on the roof of a two-story building and the rear windshield on top of another nearby building, along with other debris. The force of the explosion was so great that it blew out the windows of a nearby vacant apartment. No one was hurt.

Kyle Mattingly , who lives at the complex, was in bed when he heard the noise. "What I initially heard was just a really loud boom. At first I thought it was lightning, but it didn't sound like lightning. Then I thought it was a transformer, but it wasn't really sounding like a transformer," he said.

Mattingly said the area is typically quiet and doesn't have many problems.

"I ran outside with my phone and there was a car pretty well destroyed," Mattingly said. "The first thing I thought was bomb because I hadn't heard anything like that except on videos from Afghanistan."