Dye Bomb Explosion Disrupts Bank Holdup : Crime: Police arrest two suspected accomplices after blocking off a freeway. Four others are sought in the robbery.

Two robbers leaving a Bank of America branch Monday dropped the cash in the bank’s parking lot after a device containing dye exploded in the bag containing the money.

Two suspected accomplices were later arrested in West Los Angeles after police blocked off a freeway, authorities said. The two robbers and two other accomplices remained at large late Monday.

Jeffrey Jones, 28, and Zerrick Payne, 19, were being held in the Van Nuys Jail and are expected to be booked today on federal bank robbery charges, said Ron Twersky, a spokesman for the FBI.

Los Angeles police said that Jones and Payne were driving one of three getaway cars. They were apprehended near the interchange of the San Diego and Santa Monica freeways by police who had spotted them fleeing after the robbery.

Witnesses told police that two men--one armed with a gun--entered the branch at 5440 Topanga Canyon Blvd. about 10:30 a.m. After demanding money, one robber pushed and kicked a bank teller in her back and side. The teller was later examined by paramedics who determined that she did not require hospitalization.

The robbers had fled the bank and were getting into their getaway car when the red-dye bomb went off. The robber carrying the bag, which contained an undetermined amount of cash, dropped it in the parking lot.

Witnesses said the men tried to drive away in their light blue Oldsmobile station wagon but that they were apparently overcome by the smoke from the dye bomb and jumped from the car while it was moving.

As the car crashed into a wire fence near the back of a Von’s market in the shopping center, the robbers got into a late-model, black four-door Dodge Van with two other accomplices inside, police said. The men sped off in the van, leaving a ski mask, a gun and clothing behind in the parking lot.

Meanwhile, police said Payne and Jones drove out of the shopping center in a 1987 Chevy Monte Carlo and headed east on Ventura Boulevard. Four miles later they got on the eastbound Ventura Freeway at Reseda Boulevard.

Officers who had been alerted to the robbery by a broadcast on their police radio spotted the pair as they drove along the Ventura Freeway at White Oak Avenue. Police said the officers followed the car at normal freeway speeds east on the Ventura Freeway and then south along the San Diego Freeway.

The suspects were arrested after they were forced to stop when officers from the Police Department’s West Los Angeles Division blocked off the freeway’s southbound lanes near the Santa Monica Freeway.

The bank branch, which witnesses said has been the target of a number of robberies, is situated in a shopping center at the northeast corner of Topanga Canyon and Ventura boulevards. It was formerly a Security Pacific Bank branch but became a Bank of America branch last November when the banks merged.

Business people in the area said they believed that the men had been watching the bank before the robbery.

“We saw the guys case the place. They had parked two cars here, since Friday,” said Howard Jaffe, the manager of a dry-cleaning shop near the bank. Jaffe said he called the police when he saw the customers running out of the bank after the robbery.

“They were neat-looking kids,” said Jaffe of the suspects. “They looked like kids from good homes.”