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.
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:
Here in Van Nuys 
You must be logged in to post a comment.