A Disturbing Mystery Is Solved, and a Tourist Is in Custody

N.Y.P.D. A security-camera image apparently of Bobby Glen Jackson in the screening lane at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum on April 15. The police say Mr. Jackson hid a gun in a hotel lobby after learning that he would not be able to take it into the memorial.

The man who inadvertently set off a sweeping police investigation when he hid his pistol under a cushion in a World Trade Center hotel lobby â€" minutes before the Boston Marathon bombing â€" was a tourist simply in a hurry to stow it and get back to his tour group, a family member said on Monday.

The man, Bobby Glen Jackson, 59, was arrested Saturday in Fayetteville, N.C., and was scheduled to be brought to New York City on Monday to face charges of criminal possession of a weapon and reckless endangerment, the police said. Mr. Jackson owns a pressure-washing business in Fayetteville and does security work, which is why he owns a pistol, said the family member, who asked to remain anonymous.

“He’s not perfect by any means, but he’s a good man,” the relative said. “He’s a God-fearing man. If what had happened there had happened here, and it hadn’t been times like now, everything would be O.K., because everybody would know him.”

As I wrote in Saturday’s Crime Scene column, around 2 p.m. last Monday a man entered the lobby of the World Center Hotel and tucked a pistol under a seat cushion in the lobby. A woman discovered the gun when she sat on it a short while later, and a manager alerted police officers outside. The hotel is directly beside the entrance to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, where security is heavy and firearms are forbidden.

The bombing in Boston occurred practically simultaneously to the discovery of the gun, stirring fears that the two episodes were connected and that an attack in New York was imminent. The police officers reviewed video from the hotel, and saw a husky, bald man place a gun under the cushion. In video from the memorial, the officers spotted the same man approach an employee, who later told them that he had been asked if off-duty law enforcement officers were allowed to carry guns inside, the police said. When the employee answered no, the man hid the gun before entering the memorial, where he spent half an hour.

Detectives combed the area’s video feeds, even investigating a bald man who resembled Mr. Jackson who was seen at the time in a nearby bar. Finally, detectives determined when his ticket to the memorial was scanned and saw that he was part of a tour group staying at a hotel in New Jersey. Detectives visited the hotel on Thursday and learned his identity from a tour guide, the police said.

The day he hid the gun, Mr. Jackson had met the group outside the hotel for their ride into Manhattan, but asked the bus to wait while he retrieved something from his room. Asked later what he had forgotten, Mr. Jackson replied, “My gun,” said Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman.

Mr. Jackson has no permit to carry a gun in New York City, meaning that he was in violation of the law, Mr. Browne said. The reckless endangerment charge stems from placing the gun in a public place.

He would not be the first tourist to be arrested for carrying a legally owned gun in the city, and would not even have been the first caught carrying a gun at the memorial. In 2011, a nurse from Tennessee was arrested after asking a police officer outside the memorial where she could check the pistol in her purse.

Mr. Jackson was visiting New York with his wife and daughter, who was on a school trip, his relative said. The police said his tour group also visited the International Beauty Show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

When he returned to the World Center Hotel lobby and found his gun missing, he did not report it to the police.

“He thought that whoever found it, they would contact him and want a reward,” Mr. Jackson’s relative said. “He is not a crook.”