Half of Stolen Dynamite Turns Up

About half of the 500 pounds of dynamite stolen from a Big Bear gold mine last week turned up in two plastic tubs in front of a Riverside fire station Wednesday, forcing the lockdown of a nearby elementary school and evacuation of about a dozen homes.

The black storage containers held about half of the 686 sticks of dynamite and all 30 pounds of potentially explosive ammonium nitrate and fuel oil missing from a small gold-mining operation near Big Bear City last week, said John D’Angelo with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“Whoever turned this in did the right thing,” D’Angelo said.

Investigators were still determining the exact amount of explosive materials dropped at the Riverside site, D’Angelo said, and pursuing leads on the location of the rest of the dynamite.

A passerby on Main Street called emergency dispatchers just after 11 a.m. to report the suspicious containers in the fire station driveway near Fremont Elementary School and an onramp of the Moreno Valley Freeway.

Between 10 and 12 homes adjacent to the fire station were evacuated, said Steven Frasher, spokesman for Riverside Police Department.

Riverside police cordoned off a 1,000-foot perimeter around the fire station, where a robot inspected the containers.

Parents and commuters were diverted from their usual routes.

“We just wanted to get out of there,” said Kimberly Garcia, 15, who was forced to park blocks from the school to pick up her 5-year-old brother, Jared, from kindergarten.

Riverside school district officials placed Fremont Elementary on lockdown Wednesday afternoon as a precaution but dismissed students at the regular time, said Dennis Lucas, campus supervisor for the Riverside Unified School District.

“I was really scared,” Jared’s mother, Claudia Castillo, 33, said in Spanish as three police helicopters hovered overhead. “No one told us exactly what was going on.”

The Main Street ramp of the Moreno Valley Freeway was also closed for part of Wednesday.

“This person turning in this dynamite [is] a very good sign that perhaps he or she is willing to cooperate,” D’Angelo said.

The theft is “a very big deal when you consider the damage one stick of dynamite could cause,” D’Angelo said.

“In excess of 500 pounds of explosives -- that’s a large amount.”