Investigation into blast that killed 3 deputies expands to second location in Marina del Rey

The investigation into an explosion that killed three Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department bomb squad technicians at a training facility expanded to a second location Tuesday in Marina del Rey.

Investigators, seeking to track the origins of grenades believed to have caused last week’s deadly blast, conducted a search in the 4200 block of Via Marina. Footage from news helicopters showed a law enforcement robot being used to search a group of storage units in an alley behind the Shores apartment complex, as ABC7 reported. The action followed a search Monday of a boat at the marina.

Witnesses said more than a dozen police cars swarmed the 13900 block of Marquesas Way on Monday morning, with officers interviewing boat owners and evacuating people from the dock.

It was not immediately clear by the afternoon whether authorities had found anything on the boat.

The grenades were found last week inside a Santa Monica apartment complex storage area and transported to East L.A., where the explosion occurred Friday morning.

The blast was the single deadliest incident for the department in more than 150 years, killing department veterans Dets. Joshua Kelley-Eklund, Victor Lemus and William Osborn.

“While the pain of this loss will always be felt, we hope our efforts provide the answers a tragedy like this demands,” said Kenneth R. Cooper, special agent in charge at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The deadly explosion started as a routine call with the Sheriff’s Department’s bomb squad members responding to a Santa Monica apartment complex after a resident found grenades, apparently left by a previous tenant, tucked away in their storage unit.

The explosives, described by law enforcement sources as military-grade hand grenades and fuses, were taken from the complex in the 800 block of Bay Street on Thursday night and moved to the Biscailuz Center Training Academy, photographed and stored. The bomb squad at the time believed that at least some of the grenades were inert and that the technicians had taken an X-ray or scan of some of the ordnance and cut into at least one before it detonated.

It’s unclear how those explosives ended up inside the garage storage unit in the first place, who left them there and what caused one to detonate as the technicians moved it. Those are just a few of the questions officials are trying to answer as they try to piece together what led to the deadly blast.

Justin Kelley, who spent decades with the Connecticut State Police Department serving as commanding officer of the unit that included the bomb squad, said the age of these types of devices can range from World War I-era to present day and are extremely common.

Sometimes grenades are brought back from overseas by military members or unknowingly accepted as souvenirs. Some people also buy the grenade shells and attempt to make them live again, he said.

“A lot of it comes back from people who have served — who have been in the war — and brought something back with them,” said Kelley, who is now the vice president of global operations for Allied Universal Enhanced Protection Services. “We would probably handle one or two a week throughout the course of a year. But the thing you have to realize is — unexploded ordnance still has lethality to it so you must handle it as if it was present day manufactured and live.”

Although the investigation into Friday’s incident is being led by the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s homicide unit, the ATF is assisting. The federal agency deployed its national response team — a group of investigators who reconstruct scenes, identify the point of detonation of an explosive device and can help determine the cause of the blast.

Authorities said it was too early in the investigation to determine whether the transportation or handling of the explosives was according to department protocol and emphasized that the inquiry could take weeks or months to complete.

Typically, bomb technicians responding to a call about an explosive device will X-ray the materiel to determine whether it has been improvised, experts say.

“You can’t have the assumption that it basically came from the manufacturer’s shelf and just ended up in someone’s closet. You have to go into it under the premise that maybe something has been done to this,” Kelley said. “If it was improvised you’re going to take care of that right then and there. You’re not going to attempt to move it.”

Sometimes, technicians will render the device safe at the scene. But in many cases, the grenade is moved out of a location — either by a person or remotely — and the spoon (the safety pin or lever) is taped down so that it won’t move during transport and enable it to detonate. Then the device is placed in a total containment vessel and moved to an area where it can be safety detonated, Kelley said.

“With three people there I’m sure they all agreed to what they were going to do,” he said. “Sometimes you can take the best steps — the most well-intentioned steps — and tragedy like this still occurs.”

It is unclear why the device was brought back to the Biscailuz Center Training Academy.

Barry Black, a former FBI bomb technician, said that working with improvised explosive devices is “inherently dangerous” and that bomb technicians are trained to understand that “even the best resolution can still result in what we call a high-order detonation.”

Black, who responded to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, said investigators will treat this like other post-blast scenes and try to build a timeline of what happened before and during the explosion. If there is a witness who was near enough to know what happened, they will be vital to the investigation, he said.

Black said there probably is detailed documentation of the recovered items that investigators will use as part of the inquiry.

“The big question is what happened at the moment of detonation,” he said, adding that investigators will examine the footprint of the detonation and the fragmentation pattern to help answer that question.

Residents living near the Santa Monica apartment building were still trying to make sense of the police activity that consumed their quiet neighborhood over the weekend. The building where the devices were found is unassuming, modern and secured by a gate — separated from the rest of the neighborhood by a thin strip of shrubbery and trees.

On Monday, small remnants of caution tape scattered around were the only evidence remaining of the investigation.

Over the weekend, multiple law enforcement agencies swarmed the neighborhood, telling residents to evacuate and blocking streets from public access as they scoured the apartment complex for evidence of additional explosives. The situation left some residents uneasy.

“As someone who lives here, when you’re coming back from the beach and your street is blocked off, and they said ‘You can’t get into your home, and we can’t tell you why,’ it’s just something that’s never happened here,” resident Chase McDonald said.