Man Roamed Southwest With Weapons

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M — The Anaheim motel room where Anthony Allen died this week during a standoff with police probably was another impulsive stop in a wandering, three-month-long driving tour, investigators said Wednesday.

Allen had visited 11 cities in Arizona and California since September, staying one or two days at truck stops and inexpensive motels along the way. He arrived in Anaheim on Nov. 23, after living nearly a month at the Sandpiper Inn in Long Beach.

“He just roamed around, with no real itinerary or schedule that we can see,” Anaheim Police Sgt. Joe Vargas said. Receipts and documents found in Allen’s motel room, where one of his many explosive devices accidentally detonated in his hand during the 14-hour standoff Sunday, show Kingman, Ariz., Barstow, Victorville and Bakersfield among his many stops.

Six days after checking into the Calico Motel on Beach Boulevard, police said Allen, 50, shot and critically wounded a Circle K clerk and barricaded himself inside Room No. 17. Then the unemployed electrician settled in for a standoff with an arsenal of military weapons, including homemade hand grenades, rifles, handguns, pipe bombs and armor-piercing bullets. He booby-trapped the door and windows and installed motion detector devices in the motel room to alert him to intruders, police said.

Investigators with the Anaheim Police and Bernalillo County Sheriff’s departments explored Allen’s small house here Wednesday, finding a library of weapons catalogs and invoices from mail orders he had placed for buckets of inert grenades, ammunition and accessories such as scopes and holsters.

Allen probably remanufactured the grenades by filling them with gunpowder and rigging a fuse, detectives said. They believe he had his entire weapons collection with him during his trip, but have yet to discern a motive for either.

“He was probably just a loner who had no real agenda other than a fascination with the paramilitary,” Vargas said. “It doesn’t look like he was on a mission for anything or picked [Anaheim] out on purpose.”

He does not appear to have had connections to any anti-government or conspiracy groups, as originally feared.

Authorities on Wednesday also searched a nearby storage unit that Allen had rented for the past year, a 10-by-10-foot room packed floor to ceiling with bomb-making supplies, bullets, survivalist gear and Molotov cocktails.

“It’s like walking into a military surplus store,” said Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Sgt. Glenn Maxwell.

Ronnie Cook, who manages the storage unit complex, said Allen last stopped by in September. He paid rent for the next three months, loaded some belongings into his pickup and told Cook he was going to San Diego.

“He said he wanted to fish and swim a little,” Cook said. “He said he’d be back by January. I figured he just needed to get out of the cold is all.”

At the Sandpiper Inn in Long Beach, where Allen stayed from Oct. 26 to Nov. 2, owner Robert Bao said Wednesday that Allen “had mental problems. He was crazy. He didn’t speak logically, and he always changed his mind.”

Bao said Allen complained constantly and often left the water running in his room.

“When he checked out, he said that the hot water was too slow,” Bao recalled.

Times staff writer David Haldane contributed to this report.