On Friday, July 18, 2025, three LA Country Sheriff’s deputies, handling explosive material taken from an apartment garage in Santa Monica, were killed in an explosion at the department’s Biscailuz Center Training Academy in East Los Angeles.
The deputies had been called to 800 Bay Street last Thursday after the Santa Monica police requested assistance in safe removal of the explosives. The FBI and LAPD’s bomb squad are assisting with the investigation.
This tragedy reminded me of a documentary I had worked on about 18 years ago for the History Channel called “North Mission Road,” concerning true crime investigations inside the LA County Coroner’s Office.
The story involved the February 9, 1986 deaths of two highly experienced LAPD Bomb Squad officers who were defusing a homemade pipe bomb in a home garage at 6849 N. Vanscoy Avenue in North Hollywood.
Detective Arleigh McCree, 46, the bomb unit’s commander, and Officer Ronald Ball, 43, a 17-year veteran of the department, suffered massive shrapnel wounds and died instantly in the explosion.
McCree headed the Police Department’s bomb squad unit for seven years. He was head of security for the 1984 Summer Olympics and had been an investigator in the 1983 US Marine Corps bombing in Lebanon which killed 241 marines and sailors, the largest loss of life for the Marines since WWII.
It was the first time LAPD bomb squad members had been killed in the line of duty.
The bomb had gone off in the garage of a home where a suspect lived, a man named Donnell Morse, 36, a disgruntled makeup artist who was suspected of an ambush shooting against Howard Smit, the 74-year-old business manager of the Makeup Artists and Hair Stylists Union Local No. 706 as Smit left headquarters on Chandler near Tujunga at midnight. Smit was wounded by sniper, who fired several shots and then drove off, and who police believed was Morse.
In 1989, Morse was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the deaths of the two officers, and possession of explosives.
Rex Hoss and Daniel Shilleci as LAPD Bomb Squad Detectives.
When we made the 2007 documentary, we recreated the investigation and the explosion, using our rudimentary low budget actors and non-union special effects. I cast dozens of young actors, rented police uniforms, and booked my neighbor’s house to recreate the deadly event. PAs built a realistic, non-functioning homemade pipe bomb from an illustration inside a 1960s anarchist book found at a used bookstore in Glendale.
As associate producer I also had to find the experts, family members and living victims of the crime to interview.
We took a crew up to the Studio City home of elderly Howard Smit, then about 96, who still lived in the late 1940s Blairwood Drive home he built during his long, illustrious career that included The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964) and Planet of the Apes (1968).
He was gracious and entirely lucent, recalling every detail of his bizarre brush with death outside of the Chandler Boulevard offices of his union.
The bomb squad was shaken by the deaths of the two men, and some of the department could not quite grasp the horrific fact that an amateur bomb making criminal, who worked as a makeup artist, could somehow kill the top police experts in bomb making and bomb defusing.
The effeminate, artificial image of make-up artistry was contrasted with the brutality of war, as if the power of movie illusion had somehow fought a real-life battle with veterans from law enforcement ….and won.
I have pasted some LA Times articles about the 1986 murder investigation and bomb squad killings below:
Union Official Wounded2 in Bomb Squad KilledAnalysis of DefacementSuspect’s NatureSentencing
Last night, around 8:30 PM, Erica picked up her Avocado Spread and two drinks from a Starbucks Drive-Thru (6833 Van Nuys Blvd, Van Nuys, CA 91405). Store #23369.
Then she (or they, meaning two persons in the traditional sense of the word) drove to the 15000 Block of Hamlin Street, parked her vehicle, and devoured (her/their) meal.
When (she/they) were done (she/they) threw everything out of (her/their) car, and left (her/their) mess on the street where (she/they) had parked under the exquisite oak trees and had enjoyed a quiet dinner in the peaceful shade of dusk.
(She/they) are, unfortunately, typical of Van Nuys.
These are also the people who speed through red lights, who play their music at full blast in their car, who also steal packages from front porches, and for many people these are our friends, families and neighbors.
Do I care if these people are any particular ethnic group or wounded victim group? Does their identity matter?
Not in the least. Because identity is not a matter of character. You are born with identity but you learn character. I just care that people I live near destroy my surroundings with their ignorant selfishness.
There is no elected leader, no parent, no law enforcement person who can police this kind of selfish behavior.
It is purely a matter of individual conscience and character.
“”Photographer: Glickman. Date: 1951-09-06. Reporter: Massard. Assignment: Marijuana in Van Nuys jail. G31-32: Officer F.G. Plamonden gapes at blooming plant of Marijuana. Note bars in background. G13: l to r: Officers Ken Smith and Harry Kowalski wonder what goes on with the plant. Copsater found out that it was sent to Valley Div. to be in a lecture on narcotics. G14: Eyes wide open and wondering what marijuana plant is doing in police station is Officer Ken Smith”.
“Girl stick-up artist (Van Nuys Jail), July 19, 1951. Detective George Pettyman; Elaine Downey — 18 years (suspect); Detective Guy Moulder; Janice Hays (caught with Elaine Downey); Officer K. L. Crondell (bitten by Hays).”
On May 19, 1951 there was a holdup of a grocery store on Burbank and Van Nuys Bl.
The robbers were caught, booked and taken up the street to the jail in the Valley Municipal Building.
Two of the three suspects are pictured here, and are quite a handsome bunch: Samuel McGinnis; Charles Gordon; John Maroney.
John Maroney wears a tight white t-shirt tucked into unbelted jeans. Curly haired, brown-eyed, lean bodied, he had engaged in something stupid and could not have known how lucky he was to live in a time when the best selvedge loomed jeans were $3 and made in America. He could have worked as a house painter and bought a nice little ranch house around the corner with $500 down. He also wore his leather bomber jacket ($15?) in another photo.
His buddy (McGinnis?) is also a nice looking red haired guy in a wool camp shirt, finely tailored and elegant for an afternoon of armed robbery in Van Nuys. He looks almost like the son of the cop handcuffing him.
Source Los Angeles Examiner Negatives Collection, 1950-1961 (subcollection), Los Angeles Examiner Photographs Collection, 1920-1961 (collection), University of Southern California (contributing entity)
For 22 years I’ve had front row seats to the shit show that is Van Nuys.
I moved here in 2000 and started this blog in 2006. My purpose: to apply creative writing and photography to the realities around me.
I walked around and photographed Van Nuys, from the alleys to the houses to the buildings. Vanowen, Victory, Kester, Sepulveda.
At times my blog gave some visibility and notoriety, and I was brought in to observe the workings of the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council.
But I never cared to swim in sewers of public life. I saw how small minds functioned, the old fools who fought against housing, and always pushed for more parking lots and wider streets.
“Hey Andrew, what do you think about naming the Van Nuys Post Office the Marilyn Monroe Van Nuys Post Office?”
“Hey Andrew, can you help us fight to preserve that parking lot behind the going out of business furniture store? We want to make sure they don’t build apartments there!”
“Hey Andrew, they want to build a five-story apartment on Vanowen and Hazeltine. That’s too much!”
The VNNC was strangely absent with the modern representatives of Van Nuys, it seemed to be the preserve of old white people who fought to preserve in their imaginations a city that no longer existed.
“My parents bought my house for $11,000 in 1956 and I used to ride my bike to Tommy’s for a chili dog. Gosh, those days are gone forever. I still live there. Yeah I pay $312 a year in property taxes. Thank God I have a pension from the post office.”
There was Councilman Tony Cardenas. He wanted to tear down the Art Deco era fire station on Sylvan. Under his watch Van Nuys further disintegrated, a decade before this pandemic started, and from what I’ve read Van Nuys has been in decline since about 1975.
Nury Martinez replaced Cardenas in 2014, and I often communicated with her office, and met with her people, and got her help cleaning up the streets, picking up dumped sofas, pushing to get traffic lights installed, pedestrian crossings painted, or illegal cars towed.
She was a great ally in defending dozens of small businesses from the 2017 threat of demolition when Metro proposed a 33-acre bulldozing of hundreds of industrial buildings between Kester and Van Nuys Bl. North of Oxnard. This blog acted as an advocate for small business owners who employed locals serving as an economic incubator for new immigrants to prosper in Van Nuys.
Officer Erika Kirk, 2015
We had a wonderful Senior Lead Officer, Erika Kirk, the kind of woman you would want to work as a police officer. She drove around here and involved herself in matters large and small, but you felt safer with her presence.
The councilwoman, the cop, the council people: everything impersonated order, law, safety, and well-being.
But the reality of Van Nuys, (and greater Los Angeles) is that nothing nice stays nice without the constant threat of law enforcement.
You must fight every single day to keep homeless encampments out, marijuana farms from the houses down the street. You have to fear for your life from criminals robbing your house, from mentally ill people in the shopping mall parking lot, from the car speeding 80 miles an hour through the red light as you begin to make your left turn.
Nothing unlocked is left untouched: bicycles, decorative lights, cactuses, cars, mail, pumpkins, packages are stolen around the clock, from every lawn and every stoop, by every type of criminal. Most every crime is recorded on camera and hardly anybody is arrested.
Is this the fault of Nury Martinez?
I don’t think so.
She spoke her mind in private, in a cigar filled room with other hacks and dealmakers, and she is no worse than anybody else who criticizes her for blatant bigotry.
Is she worse than Mike Bonin who allows hundreds of violent, destructive, drug abusing and criminal people to camp out in West Los Angeles while flying the flag of compassion, and egregiously ignoring his constituents because he is on a morally higher plane of governance? When the pandemic emptied the streets of legitimate commerce he made sure that vagrants took over the sidewalks.
But in all fairness to him nobody recorded him making bigoted remarks in a room.
Hollywood Freeway Offramp, Western Av., Homeless, 2020Old Post Office
The truth is that Los Angeles is a primitive, ugly, violent, disorderly, hateful, self-centered, grotesque city of billboards, blight, traffic, fires, bad air, bad food and bad actors. It is a city that promotes promoters, celebrities, and fake makers of merriment in Hollywood.
It’s a city where the Hollywood Walk of Fame is populated by people shitting on the sidewalk, fighting with knives and guns, or walking around stoned and drunk and looking for a reason to kill.
If you are rich or famous or the child of someone rich or famous both are considered markers of high achievement.
LA takes comfort in its privileged folk in the cozy and winding streets of Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Santa Monica and Westwood, Bel Air and Beverly Hills. People here must have been shocked that to the small minded leaders of Los Angeles the city is still divided into pieces of pie: South Central, Pacoima, Westside, White, Latino, Black, Armenian, Oaxacan, Korean, Jewish.
“Why that little bitch got LAX?”
As they say on Yelp, in every single sentence, “How amazing!”
The loudest liberals who cry the loudest about injustice drive their kids ten miles away to the whitest schools.
All the broken hearts on Twitter who heard what Nury and the bad men said about the little boy, how sad they are to know that hatreds and provincialism and ethnic warfare are the foundation of the great leaders of Los Angeles.
And why is it that we still are shocked when a Latina refers to Oaxacans as ugly and short and can call a little Black boy a monkey? Have we not heard, ad nauseum, that Nury was to be praised because she was our first Latina city council president?
“She grew up poor and her family is from Zacatecas!”
Don’t judge her.
She’s what the American Dream is all about.
And a woman too.
And a mom.
And a LATINA!
LATIN-X!
If you think it’s worthy of praise to cite someone’s accidental ethnicity as an accomplishment don’t be surprised if that same person speaks and acts as only a representative of that identity!
“The first transgender fireperson! The first movie with an all-Asian cast! The first Pacific Islander marathon winner!”
“I go to that coffee stand, even though I hate their coffee, because it’s Black owned!”
Hooray!
Is there anyone who looks at this city and wonders how it might be built to benefit all its inhabitants humanely and environmentally?
If you were in power, like Nury, wouldn’t you burn with passion to rebuild, to clean, to beautify the ugliness of the San Fernando Valley? Would you arrive at work every day like Nury and walk down Van Nuys Boulevard and think that you had accomplished something?
The conversations we heard in that room were vile.
But what we have seen with our own eyes on the streets of Los Angeles is worse.
Here in Van Nuys 
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