Local News in Brief : 40 Evacuated During Van Nuys Bomb Scare
About 40 people were evacuated from a Van Nuys apartment complex Monday night when police received a report of a rocket-shaped explosive device behind the building, but the bomb scare proved groundless.
The Los Angeles Police Department’s Bomb Squad examined the device in the 7400 block of Haskell Street and determined that it was not a missile as feared but a device for gathering computerized flight data that had been discarded as junk metal, said Police Capt. Charles Dinse.
Dinse said an apartment resident had purchased the three-foot-long, 400-pound device among other items in a scrap heap at a junkyard earlier in the day. When he took a closer look, he feared it might contain explosives and called the Air Force and the LAPD, Dinse said.
“To me and to any of us novices, it looked like a guided missile of some sort,” Dinse said.
Start your day right
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
