FLORIDA GOVERNOR SAYS HE MAY STAY THERE "FOREVER"PITTSBURGH - Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, in town Friday night for a Duquesne Club fund-raiser for Sen. Rick Santorum, was pursued by a large mob of angry anti-Republican protesters on Sixth Avenue as he approached the private club. Mr. Bush, accompanied by a security guard and a female aide, retreated to the subway station, known in Pittsburgh as a "T" station, at Wood Street where he descended to the mezzanine level. The unruly mob followed him closely, angrily shouting at him. The mob cornered him in what had quickly become a tense situation.
Port Authority police, including a canine unit, arrived at the scene, and the governor was ushered into a T-station supply closet for his safety.
The crowd eventually was dispersed but Bush refused to come out of the closet, saying he "feared for his life."
The governor still remains in the closet.
Late Friday evening, Senator Santorum and other friends of the governor were brought to the T station to try to coax the governor out, and the governor's brother and father phoned him imploring him to do the same. None of their entreaties succeeded.
"I shall never come out," the governor shouted through the metal door. "This closet shall be my tomb."
Eventually the police and Bush's friends decided there was nothing more they could do, so they left.
Stephen Bland, CEO of the Port Authority Transit, said that "there is no problem" with Bush staying in the closet indefinitely. "Andy Warhol did it for years." Bland explained that Madalyn Murray O'Hair and Jimmy Hoffa both occupy closets at undisclosed locations in the Pittsburgh subway system, and Amelia Earhart is hiding in a closet beneath the former train station that is now the Grand Concourse.
