A quiet Eagle Rock evening turned into a three-hour evacuation on Wednesday after a homeowner found what looked like a grenade in the backyard, ABC7 reports.
What happened
Around 7 p.m., a resident of a home near Las Colinas and Ridgeview in Eagle Rock discovered the object and called it in. The Los Angeles Police Department responded and, describing it as a military-style device that resembled a grenade, brought in the bomb squad.
As a precaution, officers evacuated nearby residents while the squad worked. The evacuation lasted about three hours. The bomb squad disposed of the device, and the scene was cleared by around 10:30 p.m. No injuries were reported.
What is not known
The central question, how a grenade-like device ended up in a residential backyard, is unanswered. The LAPD did not say whether the device was live, a war souvenir, inert, or something else, and it did not explain how it got there.
That absence of detail is worth stating plainly rather than filling with speculation. Military-style ordnance turns up in homes more often than people expect, sometimes as decades-old keepsakes discovered while clearing out a relative's house, sometimes by less innocent routes. Which of those this was is exactly what the police have not yet said, and it would be irresponsible to guess.
The right amount of alarm
The correct way to read this is neither panic nor dismissal. The response was the cautious, standard one: when a device might be explosive, you evacuate the neighbors and send trained people to handle it, and you do that whether it turns out to be dangerous or not. That the block was cleared in three hours with no one hurt is the system working as intended.
A suspected grenade in a backyard is unsettling, and it is also the kind of call bomb squads exist to answer and usually resolve without incident, as this one was. The Herald will update the story if the LAPD says what the device actually was and how it came to be there.
