One of three L.A. County Sheriff’s deputies who died in a grenade blast last year was not formally trained to handle explosives, and was exposed to danger by colleagues who disobeyed department bomb protocols and treated the live munition as if it were inert, according to a legal claim filed by the deputy’s widow.
The July 18 explosion at the Biscailuz Center Training Academy killed detectives Victor Lemus, Joshua Kelley-Eklund and William Osborn, and marked the department’s deadliest incident in more than 150 years. It has since sparked a series of investigations into what happened that day, including an investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives into what caused the blast, and two criminal investigations into the deputies’ deaths, and the disappearance of a second grenade connected to the blast.
The legal claim filed recently by widow Nancy Lemus alleges new details in the run-up to the the explosion…