The Daily News of Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES — Geoffrey McGann says his artistic watches aren’t timepieces you wear every day. They are suitable for a special event, an art show or a party. Some of them don’t even tell time.
“They are conversation pieces,” the Rancho Palos Verdes man said Tuesday.
One place McGann no longer will wear any of his watches is in an airport, not after spending three days behind bars, charged with bringing components that could be used to build an explosive device into Oakland International Airport on Thursday.
McGann, 49, who had spent the day at his weekly teaching job in San Francisco, acknowledges his wristwatches look like bombs. They just aren’t.
“It’s made to look like a device,” he said. “You could say it’s a bomb. I’ve never thought about it in those terms.”
McGann, who serves as managing creative director at Locomotus, a media, marketing and advertising training center, and teaches at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and Otis College of Art and Design in Westchester, has a portfolio full of art work and photography. He began building his watches and handing them out to friends six months ago.
They are colorful, built with wires and fuses and switches that can be found at The Home Depot. McGann adorns them with other items like Hot Wheels cars, flowers, insects or compasses - whatever suits the person who will receive it. He stores them in a large box at home that’s decorated with similar fuses and wires and labeled “Makes stuff bloom.”
Sometimes he wears them out, especially when he plans to give them as gifts to students and friends. About six months ago, McGann explained what he was wearing on his wrist to Transportation Security Administration agents at Los Angeles International Airport before going through a scanner to make sure it was OK.
“They told me, ‘As long as you’re not trying to hide anything, it’s all right.’ So, I put the watch in the bin, and that’s how I proceeded to travel with them for months, by simply putting them in the bin on the conveyor belts,” McGann said.
Thursday night, TSA agents saw the watch go through the scanner and pulled him aside. Alameda County sheriff’s deputies were called to the security checkpoint, handcuffed McGann and put him in a patrol car while a bomb squad arrived to examine his watch.
McGann said he had no problem with the TSA agents’ concern at what he had there. But after the bomb squad determined the watch was not an explosive, McGann believes sheriff’s deputies should have set him free.
“My problem is they arrested me on a false charge,” McGann said. “The charge was felony possession of an explosive device.”
Sgt. J.D. Nelson, an Alameda County Sheriff’s Department spokesman, said McGann was held on suspicion of possession of components to make a destructive device, not possession of explosives.
Nelson said deputies knew McGann did not have explosives, but they did not know if he was part of a scheme with other people to bring components onto a plane to create a bomb with anyone who did.
“We don’t know what he’s planning to do,” Nelson said. “You’ve got a guy bringing in something you wouldn’t bring into an airport.”
Beyond that, Nelson said, McGann did not check any bags, had the watch covered up in a jacket as it went through the X-ray scanner, wore shoes two sizes too big with homemade inserts and wore a shirt with a tourniquet built into it.
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