Placentia Boy, 15, Injured by Explosive in His Backpack

A 15-year-old boy was injured Friday when a homemade explosive device he had been carrying in his backpack for the past few days exploded at school during lunch hour, authorities said.

The boy, a sophomore at El Dorado High School, was not arrested but investigators said he could be charged later with criminal possession of a destructive device in public. He suffered deep cuts in his hands and bruised fingers, according to a spokeswoman at Placentia Linda Community Hospital.

Seconds after the lunch bell rang at 12:12 p.m., students walking to the cafeteria heard a “bang, the kind that hurt your ears,” said a 16-year-old sophomore who was a few feet from the explosion.

Another 15-year-old said she saw the explosion after the boy took what looked like a wallet from his backpack. He dropped his backpack immediately and fell on his knees with both hands clutching each other.

“He was bleeding real bad,” she said.

Students at the school said the boy had been carrying the device around for the past few days, showing it to friends who were interested, investigators said.

“He was displaying the explosive device on the day of the accident,” Police Sgt. Kim Redifer said.

The Orange County bomb squad was summoned to the scene, where two backpacks, the other one possibly belonging to another student who had been nearby, lay on the ground near the school’s computer lab building on Valencia Avenue. The bags were surrounded by pens, pencils and shreds of paper from the explosion. The boy’s backpack had a hole in it the size of a soup bowl.

Authorities said the device was made of two sealed cartridges of compressed gas, the kind used in pellet guns. They are from one to three inches long and a half-inch in diameter, Redifer said. Information on what detonated them was not available Friday.

Such devices are not new, Redifer said, adding that he once knew a boy who blew off three of his fingers while handling a similar type of explosive.

“It’s been around a while; I know it was around when I was in high school,” Redifer said.

School security guards said the boy was lucky that he wasn’t injured more seriously and that he didn’t injure anyone else.

“The way it sounded, I thought it was a lot worse,” a classmate said, “Thank God it wasn’t.”