Among survivors, puzzlement, hope and relief

As victims of the Unabomber came to terms yesterday with the arrest of 53-year-old Theodore J. Kaczynski as the prime suspect, their overwhelming reaction was neither anger nor fear, but simple puzzlement tempered with a relief that the long spree of bombings may be over.

“I have no idea who he is,” said Percy Wood, the retired president of United Airlines, who was injured June 10, 1980, when a bomb sent to his Lake Forest, Ill., home exploded. The bomb arrived in a book called “Ice Brothers” and a note attached read: “You will find it of great social significance.”

Wood, who retired in 1982, applauded the 18 years of sleuthing by federal law enforcement agencies that resulted in Kaczynski’s arrest as a suspect in the bombings.

“They did a great job after all these years,” Wood said.

At the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, where bombings occurred in 1982 and 1985, there still are questions about why Kaczynski, a former mathematics professor there, might have sent bombs that injured an engineering professor, Diogenes Angelakos, in 1982, and a graduate student, John Hauser, now a professor at the University of Colorado, in 1985.

“I would like to ask the guy … if he believes in making changes for the good, why would he be hurting people? That’s the only thing I’d like to know,” said Angelakos, now an electrical engineering professor emeritus at Berkeley.

Angelakos’ right hand was mangled in a faculty lounge in 1982 when what looked like a gasoline can exploded as he began to move it. Three years later, Hauser was maimed by a bomb in the same building.

“Maybe he can explain why he did this,” said Doris R. Simpson, an administrator in the electrical engineering department, who knows Angelakos and Hauser well. “That is the big question. Cal did not do anything. What did we do? We are in electrical engineering. D.J. did not know him and Hauser did not know him. You wonder why.”

The last two bombings killed two executives.

Thomas J. Mosser, a vice president of the New York-based advertising firm of Young & Rubicam, was killed in the kitchen of his North Caldwell, N. J., home, on Dec. 10, 1994, when he opened a package that had come in the mail the day before.

Mosser’s wife, Susan, and their two daughters, Kim, then 13, and Kelly, 15 months, were not talking yesterday. Associates at his company also had no comment.

The town’s police chief, James Rush, said in a telephone interview, “The members of the Mosser family ... feel it’s premature to comment, being that the sole charge against the man captured is possession of explosives. However, that’s a positive development and our community is, of course, hopeful that this will put this matter at rest.”

And in Sacramento, at the California Forestry Association, where officials were planning to commemorate the first anniversary of the April 24 death of president Gilbert Murray, there was a sense of “confusion and puzzlement” over why Kaczynski would have targeted the lumber trade association, said Donn Zea, the vice president.

“We are all anxious, but there is no doubt that neither Gil, nor our former president, to whom the package was addressed, had heard of this guy.” At Yale University, where computer science professor David Gelertner was nearly blinded in one eye by a 1993 bomb, there was a sense of relief.

“Of course, we’re all watching with interest and we hope they do have the person responsible,” said spokeswoman Cynthia Atwood. She said Ge-lernter was unavailable.

Richard J. Roberts of New England BioLabs in Beverly, a 1993 Nobel Prize winner, received a threatening letter attributed to the Unabomber. He said simply, “I hope it is the right guy.”

Fred Kaplan of the Globe staff contributed to this report, which also contains information from the Associated Press. Brelis wrote fixmi Boston and Adams from San Francisco.