Wal-Mart received a letter in the mail saying there was a bomb in the store Monday afternoon.

According to police reports, DeKalb Police responded to a call at 1:45 p.m. about an anonymous letter, which had residue on it, sent to the store, located at 2300 Sycamore Road.

Around 2:45 p.m., the lights inside Wal-Mart were flashed on and off by the store management. The flashing caused a power surge in computers and registers used by employees.

“It started acting funny, so I turned it off,” said a photo shop employee. “But then it turned itself back on. Some cashiers told me the same thing happened to their registers. It was really weird.”

The flashing informed employees to begin evacuating the customers out of the building.

“The evacuation was Wal-Mart’s idea,” said Lt. Jim Kayes of the DeKalb Police Department. “They weren’t about to risk the letter being a hoax.”

By 3:30 p.m., a crowd of 50 to 60 people, mostly Wal-Mart employees, gathered around the east side of the building.

A private plane circled overhead as police blocked traffic to the road in front of Wal-Mart.

Police stood by the main entrances, informing arriving customers of the situation and keeping people 100 feet away from the building.

Employees refused to comment to the press while waiting outside.

“They’re told not to talk to press except to tell them to call Wal-Mart Corporate,” said Tom Williams, customer relations spokesman for Wal-Mart. “They’re also taught about procedure involving bomb threats and evacuation.”

There were few customers in the crowd with the Wal-Mart employees around 3:30 p.m. Most of the remaining customers eventually left, and people arriving to shop decided not to wait around.

Three officers from University Police were called in to help the DeKalb Police check out the building.

Lt. Matt Kiederlen, Kazan, a bomb-sniffing dog and his trainer Brad Fleming went through shipping and receiving areas, storage rooms and other parts of the store. Kazan didn’t respond to anything that could have been a bomb.

These officers are part of a Critical Incident Response Team, which is trained to handle bomb, chemical and biological threats.

Customers were allowed back into the store at about 4:30 p.m.

The DeKalb Police don’t have any suspects, but there are following a few promising leads, Kayes said.

“Some imbecile used the mail system to send a bomb threat to Wal-Mart,” Kayes said. “They forgot that it takes time for mail to be delivered.”