WBRZ - Baton Rouge

New York City officials call the device "amateurish," but say the bomb found in a sport utility vehicle
in Times Square last night was powerful and could have been "very deadly."

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says authorities are treating the car bomb discovered in New York's Times Square last night as a potential terrorist attack. She says it's still too soon to tell who's responsible, but that investigators are sifting through the evidence including fingerprints and surveillance video.

Times Square was nearly a ghost town for a few hours after thousands of people were cleared from the streets

Two street vendors were the ones who alerted police after seeing a suspicious vehicle. One of those vendors says "we dodged a bullet" when the bomb failed to explode. He says he had just alerted a police officer when "smoke started coming out," followed by a popping sound like firecrackers.