By Richard Winton
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — Last summer, a grenade exploded at an L.A. County Sheriff’s Department training facility, killing three bomb squad detectives. Now, the L.A. County district attorney’s office is considering whether to file criminal charges in their deaths.
The sheriff’s arson and explosives unit retrieved two abandoned grenades from the garage of a Santa Monica apartment complex on July 17. The explosives were then moved to the Biscailuz Center Training Academy in L.A., where, the next day, one of the grenades detonated, killing Detectives Victor Lemus, Joshua Kelley-Eklund and William Osborn and marking the department’s deadliest incident in more than 150 years.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau detectives, shortly after the explosion, focused their attention on a former military special operations forces member who allegedly left the grenades in a storage area of the Santa Monica housing complex, according to two law enforcement sources at the time. The apartment complex was where he or a significant other had once lived, according to those sources.
Nicole Nishida, a Sheriff’s Department spokesperson, confirmed that department detectives had submitted a criminal investigation on April 23 to the district attorney’s office into the deadly grenade incident.
Information on who could be charged in the deputies’ deaths or the handling of the explosives — or the charges they might face — was not available. But search warrants have focused on the source of the grenades.
In the days after the deadly explosion, detectives and bomb technicians, using search warrants, combed a yacht and a storage lockup in Marina del Rey. A law enforcement robot was used to search a group of storage units in an alley behind the Shores apartment complex, and could be seen removing items.
The yacht is tied to a former U.S. special operations operator turned stunt coordinator, according to sources familiar with the probe.
The deadly explosion sparked a series of investigations into what happened that day, including a probe by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives into the cause of the blast. Within the Sheriff’s Department, there are also two criminal investigations underway — one into the deputies’ deaths and another into the disappearance of a second grenade. Following the blast, sheriff’s officials said the second device was unaccounted for and missing.
The ATF investigation has been completed but has not been made public because of the ongoing investigations, a law enforcement source said Tuesday.
Last month, The Times revealed a third criminal investigation was underway into the distribution of graphic crime scene photos of the detectives’ bodies. A commander was relieved of duty in connection with that investigation.
A California Division of Occupational Safety and Health investigation into the explosion found that, leading up to last year’s incident, there was a series of “willful” safety violations by the Sheriff’s Department, including failure to provide effective training and the presence of unattended explosives. That investigation resulted in eight citations and more than $350,000 in fines, according to records from the state agency reviewed by The Times. The Sheriff’s Department said it had appealed the findings.
The deadly explosion started as a routine call, with the Sheriff’s Department 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, were taken from the complex in the 800 block of Bay Street in Santa Monica as the bomb squad assisted the Santa Monica police in the call.
According to a legal claim filed by Lemus’ widow, the two other deputies, Kelley-Eklund and Osborn, went on the call and drove a truck that “contained lower-quality equipment as compared to what would be contained on the Bomb Truck.” After arriving on the scene, Osborn used an older X-ray machine to examine the explosive device. Osborn then falsely reported to the Santa Monica officers that the device was inert, the legal claim alleges. “Osborn’s reliance on the X-ray meant he would not take the required steps to render the device safe.”
The next day, the grenades were taken to the training center, where such “live explosive devices are prohibited,” the claim alleges. “The deputies used one for a training demonstration.”
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