Explosive-laden Calif. house set to be destroyed

[December 09, 2010]  SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Some neighbors were headed out of town and others were staying nearby as authorities made final preparations to destroy a suburban San Diego home so packed with explosives that it was deemed too dangerous to enter.

Sheriff's deputies knocked on doors Wednesday night to urge scores of residents to leave before the home is set ablaze. Residents farther away were told to close their windows and stay inside during the highly controlled burn, which was scheduled to begin after Thursday morning rush hour.

Crews have built a 16-foot firewall to protect the closest homes. Officials planned to close down a section of Interstate 15 during the burn, which will be monitored by more than a dozen air pollution sensors.

San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore said the burn was expected to last one to four hours.

"It has to be dealt with at some time," Gore told reporters outside San Diego's federal courthouse Wednesday, after a judge denied a defense attorney's request to delay the burn. "Our belief is the sooner, the better."

George Jakubec, a 54-year-old unemployed software consultant who rented the Escondido home, has pleaded not guilty to charges of making destructive devices and robbing three banks. Neither he nor authorities have not said why he had the explosives.

Authorities said the only way to safely dispose of the material is to burn down the ranch-style home, which is so cluttered with unstable chemicals that even bomb-disposing robots can't be used to enter it.

Nearly every room is packed with piles of explosive material and items related to making homemade bombs, prosecutors said. In the backyard, bomb technicians found six mason jars with highly unstable Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, or HMTD, which can explode by someone stepping on it.

A coffee table was found cluttered with documents and strewn with detonators, prosecutors said. It displayed a bowl of white powdery HMTD.

"The coffee table is what the bomb squad calls ground zero," Assistant U.S. Attorney Rees Morgan told the judge Wednesday. "This really was an assembly line for detonators being created in his house. ...It is a no-go zone."

Tim Latulippe, whose backyard borders Jakubec's property, said he was sure the burn would go off without a hitch. He hoped to watch it live on the Internet with his automotive students at Escondido High School. His wife planned to watch from the family camper, parked at a friend's house across town.

"They're going to burn a house down, it's going to be cool, and we get to go back to our normal lives," Latulippe said as the family prepared to evacuate.

Bomb squad officers who inspected the property believe Jakubec has manufactured so many devices for so long that "even he has forgotten the location and type of explosives stashed throughout the property," prosecutors said in a court filing.

Officers said they found the same types of chemicals used by suicide bombers and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The materials included Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, which was used in the 2001 airliner shoe-bombing attempt as well as airplane cargo bombs discovered last month by authorities.

The chemicals were found after a gardener accidentally set off an explosion at the home by stepping on what authorities believe was a byproduct of HMTD.

Defense attorneys wanted to delay the burn to allow more time to collect evidence, including notes scribbled on graph paper and a hardcover book about mining.

But U.S. District Judge Larry Burns accepted testimony of FBI bomb expert James Verdi, who said it would irresponsible to allow anyone to enter.

Verdi, a veteran of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who was inside the home several times, testified that the HMTD found was "an amount we had never seen, either domestically or internationally."

"My first entry into the backyard, it was like we were entering into a minefield," he said.

[Associated Press; By ELLIOT SPAGAT and JULIE WATSON]

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