Police Arrest Man on Mail Bomb Charges

A North Hollywood man who called himself the “messiah” and wanted to become secretary general of the United Nations appeared in court Thursday on charges of sending a manifesto accompanied by bombs to Southern California news outlets, authorities said.

Daniel Paul Evans, 54, who police described as an “unemployed white male,” was arrested earlier in the day at his North Hollywood home by Los Angeles and Burbank police officers on 11 counts of suspicion of explosive-related offenses, LAPD Cmdr. Tim McBride said.

Evans was led into Burbank Municipal Court in handcuffs and appeared bewildered by the news cameras aimed at him from the rear of the courtroom.

At the request of Evans’ attorney, Deputy Public Defender Fran Kippen, Judge Alan Kalkin postponed his arraignment until Aug. 15.

Kippen would not comment on the case.

“He said he wanted to save the world,” McBride said, describing a yearlong case he referred to as “domestic terrorism.”

Authorities said they were still trying to piece together Evans’ background, but so far they had found found only misdemeanor arrests unrelated to bomb-making in his arrest record.

A copy of Evans’ alleged manifesto obtained by The Times, however, talks about growing up in the 1960s and describes the writer as the “cosmic, surreal leader” of an era that never materialized.

The writer, who signed himself the “Rock,” said he was immersed in the rock music culture. He said he realized that to become U.N. secretary general and usher in a utopian era of racial harmony, he needed rock musicians “to recognize me as the nebulous root of the ‘60s.”

He also says the evolution of humanity calls for a messiah, which he claimed to be.

According to authorities, Evans mailed seven homemade explosive devices, accompanied by a 77-page manifesto, between April 3 and April 7, 1995, to media offices, including those of KCAL, KTLA and NBC.

Police also listed The Times among media outlets that received the bombs, but Times spokeswoman Laura Morgan said the newspaper “did not receive such a device, nor a manifesto, as the police report indicates.” McBride said it could not be determined Thursday night why The Times was on investigators’ list of recipients.

If detonated, the explosives were capable of “blowing off a hand” or “putting out an eye” within a 3- to 10-foot area, said LAPD Det. Lawrence Garrett.

The Postal Inspection Service also participated in the yearlong investigation, a spokeswoman said.

Evans allegedly mailed about 200 of the manuscripts without bombs to entertainers, particularly television personalities and rock groups’ managers, Garrett said.

Although the first few devices that Evans allegedly sent did not explode when the packages were opened because they had fuses that needed to be lighted, police said that on Sept. 28, 1995, Evans left a bomb in a mailbox at Palm Avenue and Bel Aire Drive in Burbank, which exploded.

“He wanted to show us he could make them go off,” Garrett said.

During the investigation, Garrett said, authorities were able to correspond with Evans, who was requesting local authorities’ help in contacting U.N. officials.

The investigating officers pretended to be working on his request “to keep communicating with him,” Garrett said.

At one point in the investigation, Garrett said, he and other investigators thought that they had the Unabomber on their hands because of the similarities in the cases, including manifestoes.

Evans was taken to the Los Angeles County Men’s Central jail and held in lieu of $4.5-million bail.

Times correspondent Steve Ryfle contributed to this story.