‘Delightful Man’ : Friends and Family Mourn Bomb Victim

In a small chapel in Santa Ana on Thursday, 50 people mourned the death of Ansel E. Young, a 59-year-old accountant killed in an explosion last week in Laguna Hills.

Sheriff’s deputies have suggested that Young may have died planting a bomb under a car belonging to the mother of a longtime enemy.

But after a memorial service Thursday, relatives and friends of Young were adamant in their conviction that he would not have planted a bomb.

“It’s not true,” said the Rev. Norman Versteeg of the Irvine Seventh Day Adventist Church, who led a half-hour “service of love and respect” for Young. “None of the people I know think that he planted the bomb.”

Investigation Continuing

Versteeg and Young’s other friends described him as a stable man--a small businessman and Tustin Rotary Club member--who was a loving husband to his wife, June, for 35 years.

According to Lt. Richard J. Olson of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, it may take investigators three more weeks to piece together what happened on Feb. 20 when Young was killed outside a Laguna Hills office building. A bomb went off under a car belonging to the mother of El Toro resident Harold Vincent, a former Marine Corps general who was working in an office building nearby. He was not injured.

Vincent and Young were said to have been involved in a dispute over water rights in Oregon.

Olson said two sheriff’s investigators returned Wednesday from five days in Medford, Ore., where Young and Vincent owned adjacent ranches.

On Saturday a business associate of Vincent’s had told The Times that Young “went berserk” when an Oregon judge recently ruled against him--and for Vincent--in a conflict over water rights.

Olson said he had no information about any feud and could not discuss suspects “until the investigation is totally completed.”

He said examining the physical evidence from the explosion would be the key to understanding the bombing and the motives involved.

“You have to almost liken it to an airplane crash, where you put the pieces in a large room and they’re laid out and then you start, like a jigsaw puzzle, piecing it back together,” Olson said.

‘A Delightful Man’

Approached after the half-hour service at Fairhaven Memorial Park Mortuary, several mourners refused to give their names but defended Young as a good and peace-loving man.

One couple said Young had been their accountant for 10 years and called him “a delightful man.” They said Young was an avid fisherman and hunter who kept animal heads and the skins of rattlesnakes on the walls of his office in Santa Ana.

Another friend said that he was a Rotary Club member with Young in Tustin, had known him 25 years, and that “I just don’t think there’s a bad bone in his body.”

As Versteeg ended the service, he urged his congregation to consider that the innocent die with the guilty. He added: “We don’t have all the answers we would like to have. Some day we will.”