LOS ANGELES — A man whose cache of illegal fireworks in South L.A. brought out the LAPD bomb squad, whose bungled detonation blew up a residential neighborhood and injured 17 people last year, was sentenced Wednesday to five months in prison and two years of supervised release.
Arturo Ceja III, 27, pleaded guilty in August 2021 in federal court to the unlicensed transport of explosives from Nevada to California.
Ceja was not fined and will pay no restitution, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Los Angeles police discovered Ceja’s stash in the backyard of a home on East 27th Street on June 30, 2021, after receiving a tip regarding illegal sales.
Among the 16 tons of explosive materials, police said, were homemade fireworks that were deemed too volatile to haul away from the home. Instead, they were put into a “total containment vessel” where they would be detonated on-site by the Los Angeles Police Department.
One technician raised concerns about the number of explosives being loaded into the vessel, according to an LAPD inspector general’s report released in March.
“This is too much to do one shot. We’re gonna break it up, right?” the technician recalled saying to a colleague.
The concerns were not heeded and the technician was told he should “relax,” according to the report.
As the bomb squad worked to quantify how much material needed to be disposed of, the lead technician skipped a crucial step, the inspector general noted: He did not weigh the explosives but only estimated.
The vessel, rated to hold 33 pounds of explosives, was loaded with 39.8 pounds of material, investigators with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found.
When the materials were finally detonated, the results were catastrophic.
Foundations were cracked, windows were shattered and more than a dozen people suffered injuries, including cuts and hearing loss.
Over 30 properties were damaged and more than 80 residents were displaced.
