The investigation into an explosion that killed three technicians from the bomb team of the Sheriff department of the County Los Angeles in a training center extended to a second location on Tuesday in Marina Del Rey.
The investigators, seeking to follow the origins of the grenades which would have caused the deadly explosion of last week, carried out a search in the 4200 block of Via Marina. News Helicopters images have shown that a law application was used to search for a group of storage units in an alley behind the Shores apartments complex, as ABC7 reported. The action followed a excavation on Monday from a boat to the marina.
Witnesses said that more than a dozen police cars have invaded the 13,900 brand of brands Way on Monday morning, the police interviewing owners of boats and evacuating people from the quay.
He was not immediately clear in the afternoon if the authorities had found anything on the boat.
Grenades were found last week in a storage area of the Santa Monica apartments complex and transported to East la, where the explosion occurred on Friday morning.
The explosion has been the deadliest incident for the department for more than 150 years, killing veterans. Joshua Kelley-Eklund, Victor Lemus and William Osborn.
“Although the pain of this loss is always being felt, we hope that our efforts will provide the responses a tragedy as this requires,” said Kenneth R. Cooper, special agent responsible for the office of alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives.
The fatal explosion began as a routine call with the members of the bomb team of the Sheriff department responding to a complex of Santa Monica apartments after a resident found grenades, apparently left by a previous tenant, nestled in their storage unit.
The explosives, described by sources of application of the law as grenades and military quality fuses, were taken from the complex in Bloc 800 on rue Bay Thursday evening and moved to the Biscailuz Center Training Academy, photographed and stored. The bomb team at the time believed that at least some of the grenades were inert and that the technicians had taken a radiography or a scan of some of the ammunition and cut in at least one before it was exploded.
We do not know how these explosives found themselves inside the garage storage unit in the first place, which left them there and which exploded that the technicians moved it. These are just some of the questions that those responsible try to answer because they try to reconstruct what led to the fatal explosion.
Justin Kelley, who has spent decades with the Connecticut State Police Service as a unit commander who included the bomb team, said the age of these types of devices can go from the era of the First World War to the present day and is extremely common.
Sometimes grenades are brought from abroad by soldiers or without knowing it accepted as memories. Some people also buy pomegranate shells and try to make them live again, he said.
“This is largely coming back to people who have served – who have been in the war – and who have brought something with them,” said Kelley, who is now vice -president of global operations for protection services Allied Universal Enhanced. “We probably cook for one or two a week throughout a year. But the thing you have to do is – unploded ammunition always have lethality so that you have to manage it as if it were made and alive today.”
Although the Friday incident survey is led by the homicide unit of the Sheriff’s Department of the County of Los Angeles, the ATF helps. The Federal Agency has deployed its national response team – a group of investigators who reconstruct the scenes, identifies the detonation point of an explosive device and can help determine the cause of the explosion.
The authorities said that it was too early in the investigation to determine whether the transportation or treatment of explosives was in accordance with the department’s protocol and stressed that the investigation could take weeks or months.
As a rule, bombs technicians who respond to a call on an explosive device will radigate the equipment to determine if it has been improvised, according to experts.
“You cannot have the hypothesis that it was mainly from the manufacturer’s shelf and you are simply found in someone’s closet. You have to enter it under the premise that perhaps something has been done,” Kelley said. “If it was improvised, you will take care of that at that time. You are not going to try to move it.”
Sometimes technicians will make the device safe on the scene. But in many cases, the grenade is moved to a location – either by a person, or at a distance – and the spoon (the safety pin or the lever) is glued so that it does not move during transport and allows it to explode. Then, the device is placed in a container of total containment and moved to an area where it can be detonated in terms of security, Kelley said.
“With three people there, I am sure they all accepted what they were going to do,” he said. “Sometimes you can take the best steps – the most intentioned steps – and a tragedy as this one still occurs.”
We don’t know why the aircraft was brought back to the Biscailuz Center Training Academy.
Barry Black, a former FBI bomb technician, said that working with improvised explosive devices is “intrinsically dangerous” and that bombs technicians are trained to understand that “even the best resolution can still cause what we call high -level detonation”.
Black, who responded to the Oklahoma City attack in 1995, said investigators will deal with this like other post-exploitation scenes and will try to build a chronology of what happened before and during the explosion. If there is a witness who was close enough to know what happened, they will be vital for the investigation, he said.
Black said there was probably detailed documentation of the recovered items that investigators will use as part of the investigation.
“The big question is what happened at the time of detonation,” he said, adding that investigators will examine the imprint of detonation and the fragmentation model to help answer this question.
Residents living near the Santa Monica building were still trying to give meaning to the police activity that consumed their quiet area this weekend. The building where the devices have been found is unpretentious, modern and secured by a door – separated from the rest of the neighborhood by a thin strip of shrubs and trees.
On Monday, the small remains of dispersed adhesive tape were the only evidence that remained in the investigation.
During the weekend, several law enforcement organizations have invaded the neighborhood, telling residents to evacuate and block the streets of public access while they were traveling the apartment complex for additional explosives. The situation left some uncomfortable residents.
“As a person who lives here, when you come back from the beach and your street is blocked, and they have said” you cannot enter your home, and we cannot tell you why “, that’s just something that has never happened here,” said Chase McDonald, the resident.
