2 ‘Street People’ Held in Laguna City Hall Bombing

A man who said he was “tired of being harassed” by Laguna Beach police was arrested with a male companion hours after a stick of dynamite exploded beside Laguna Beach City Hall early Friday, breaking 24 windows but causing no other damage and no injuries, authorities said.

Lt. James White said both suspects were known to police as among the homeless “street people” who frequent Laguna Beach’s Main Beach.

“They’ve had a lot of contact with police in the past,” White said, identifying the pair as Donald Juan Wheeler, 23, and James Louis Durand, 27. Both gave the address of the same Laguna Beach shelter, police said.

In a police interview, Wheeler allegedly said he set the device because he was “tired of being harassed by police,” White said.

Police denied having ever harassed the two men.

The dynamite was placed in a three-foot-wide landscaped space between two buildings--neither of them the Police Department--and it exploded a few minutes before 6 a.m., when no one was in either building, police said. “If it had been in a closed area, there would have been more damage,” White said.

Damage was confined to windows in the city manager’s, city clerk’s and Recreation Department offices, Police Chief Neil Purcell said. He added that police had received no phone calls about the bomb before or after the explosion and that no note or graffiti had been found at the scene.

According to Purcell, the dynamite appeared to have been detonated by a 4-foot-to-6-foot length of fuse that burns one foot every 45 seconds.

About eight hours after the explosion, investigators, acting on a tip from other local street people, arrested the two men. Police had no idea how the pair had obtained the explosive.