The deaths of three Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies in a grenade explosion last year have triggered a state workplace-safety probe that found serious problems in how the department trained and handled explosives, according to California officials and court-related accounts reported this week. The state found the department’s conduct included “willful” safety violations, among them leaving explosives unattended and failing to provide what investigators called effective training.
California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health issued eight citations in January that resulted in about $350,000 in fines, according to the state. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is appealing the citations, according to the state.
The July 2025 explosion occurred in the parking lot of a training facility and killed detectives Joshua Kelley-Eklund, Victor Lemus and William Osborn of the department’s arson and explosives team, one of the department’s largest losses of life in a single incident, according to reporting cited by the Associated Press. Investigators traced the lead-up to the team’s handling of recovered grenades from a Santa Monica apartment complex the previous day.
Sheriff Robert Luna said the detectives X-rayed the grenades after recovery and believed they were “inert,” or inactive. At least one grenade was taken to an LASD training facility, where it detonated. A week later, Luna announced that the second grenade was missing, and the department continued investigating what happened to it, according to the AP report.
In the state’s description of what went wrong, investigators said the department failed to correct unsafe working conditions and practices tied to handling explosives. The Division of Occupational Safety and Health also said the department did not ensure employees used proper protective equipment when handling explosives, did not properly document training, and did not identify and evaluate hazards involved in transporting and storing explosive materials.
The state also said explosives materials were left unattended and were not stored properly or placed in “suitable containers” when transported manually, according to Denisse Gómez, a Division of Occupational Safety and Health spokesperson. Gómez said the circumstances highlighted what she described as employers’ duty to anticipate hazards and take meaningful steps to protect workers, particularly during high-risk operations involving explosive materials.
The state’s enforcement action was also accompanied by litigation about records. The Division of Occupational Safety and Health sued the LASD in January for not complying with its investigation and for not turning over subpoenaed documents, according to the AP account. The report said that when the state first requested training records, dispatch logs, incident reports related to the grenades, and safety inspection records, the department responded with “only a limited number of documents,” one of which was almost entirely redacted, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit said the department then produced a limited set of documents responsive to only two of the nineteen categories requested in a later subpoena, according to the AP report. In a response filed by the sheriff’s department, the department said the state waited months to request documents, giving it little time to provide them, and it said that bomb-squad materials used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation were not distributable without risking “jeopardizing public safety and national security,” and would need to be requested directly from the FBI, according to court documents.
Nicole Nishida, the sheriff’s spokesperson, said in a statement that the department was collaborating with state investigators to the extent permitted by law while other inquiries continued. Nishida also said the department immediately worked with the Los Angeles Police Department bomb squad, the FBI and the ATF to obtain an “independent assessment” of what happened and ways to strengthen procedures. She said the department updated its training manual and guidelines for the arson and explosives team and introduced new equipment, and that the sheriff’s office and county attorneys were working to ensure any information provided meets legal requirements and does not compromise the integrity of the ongoing investigation.