Son Says Ford Rarely Spoke About Work

The details just get stranger and stranger. Suspected military explosives buried in the family yard. Covert South African seminars on biological weapons. Speculation about CIA connections, and about money as motive for the attempted murder of a business partner.

The details just don’t add up to the father Larry C. Ford Jr. said he knew.

“Knowing my dad very well, I know what a caring person he was. He would never do anything to harm or endanger his family, or endanger his neighbors,” the son said during an interview Saturday morning at the office of the family’s lawyer.

It’s been more than a week since Ford’s father walked into an upstairs bedroom of his Irvine home and shot himself to death. The suicide remains a critical twist in a bizarre case that began Feb. 28 with the attempted assassination of the elder Ford’s business partner, James Patrick Riley, as he arrived for work at the Irvine Spectrum offices of Biofem, Inc.

The son, a senior in microbiology at Brigham Young University, said he talked with his parents after Riley was shot but declined Saturday to detail the conversation, saying that last week he was summoned before the Orange County Grand Jury and cannot discuss his testimony.

Ford said the family knew the father had buried weapons in the yard, but that it didn’t strike them as unusual. The weapons’ existence--and exactly what had been buried--wasn’t the subject of family discussions, he said.

Police on Friday removed six canisters containing weapons, including military-grade explosives. Ford family lawyer William Bollard said the family told investigators about the canisters and where to find them.

Ford said there were other issues that never made it to the family discussion table. Microbiological research was one such topic, even though the son is following his father’s footsteps into medicine. The difference, he said, is career focus. The father became a researcher; the son wants to be a doctor.

The father’s business was another topic that was never discussed. Ford’s son said his father disliked dealing with the financial side of research.

“It wasn’t his thing,” the son said. “That’s why he and Pat were a good partnership.”

He said his father and Riley, a career businessman, were professional friends who rarely socialized together. He was unfamiliar with their business history.

Riley could not be reached for comment. He has remained in seclusion since being released from the hospital several days after he was shot through the face.

Ford said his father and mother, Diane, met and married in Utah and moved to Los Angeles around 1970 so his father could study medicine at UCLA. The couple decided to settle permanently in the area and started a family. In addition to Larry Jr., 24, the couple had two other children, Scott, 22, and Kerilyn, 20, who are also students at BYU.

Around 1987, Ford said, the family moved from Los Angeles to Irvine so the children could attend the suburban city’s highly regarded schools even as the father continued to work at UCLA Medical Center.

“At UCLA, he was able to do research in addition to seeing patients,” Ford said. “He was willing to do all that commuting for the family.”

Ford described his father as a faithful Mormon devoted to his family and to the pursuit of genealogy. He had traced family roots as far back as medieval Europe, the son said.

He also was an avid gun collector, a hobby that the family has maintained led to the stockpile of weapons police removed from the home. Ford said the house also contains many hunting trophies and mementos, including the head of a cape buffalo.

The elder Ford was buried Friday in Provo, Utah, where he grew up. The son said that from an early age his father showed interest in science. He raised alligators in a bathtub and won science fairs dating back to middle school years. In the late 1960s, he said, his father won a national science fair award for experiments designing personal defenses against radiation poisoning.

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After graduating from the UCLA medical school in 1975, the father practiced medicine for a while, maintaining an office in the Buena Park area, the son said. In recent years, he focused on research through Biofem. But he continued to see patients informally.

“The only time he would see patients would be friends, people who needed help. Boy Scouts who needed a physical for camp, that kind of thing,” Ford said. “Friends. Friends of friends. A couple days a week there would be somebody at the house to get a physical.”

That work, the son said, was an extension of what he sees as his father’s core characteristic.

“He might not have been someone who would come up and hug you, but he was a very loving guy,” the son said. “People would meet him and he would seem reserved and gruff. But we knew him as a teddy bear.”