Shannon Rincon has sued the city of Santa Monica over the grenade explosion that killed her husband and two fellow law enforcement officers last summer.
Rincon, the widow of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy William Osborn, 58, filed the complaint on September 11, court papers show. She alleges that Santa Monica officials failed to give her husband’s unit critical information about a military-style explosive device before it detonated on July 18, killing Osborn and two colleagues assigned to the LASD Special Enforcement Bureau’s Arson Explosives Detail.
The other victims were Detective Joshua Kelley-Eklund, 41, and Detective Victor Lemus, 40. The three men had a combined 74 years of service with the department and left behind 16 children in total.
The grenade had been collected from an apartment complex on Bay Street in Santa Monica the previous day at the request of the Santa Monica Police Department, according to the lawsuit. Rincon claims that city personnel described the devices as “inactive, inert, and safe to transport despite lacking a sufficient factual basis.”
“Had City of Santa Monica personnel had reasonably investigated, the devices would have been treated as live and unstable; and the fatal explosion would have been avoided,” the papers state.
The force of the blast shattered windows and triggered car alarms from 100 feet away. The medical examiner determined Osborn’s cause of death was multiple blast injuries.
Rincon’s lawsuit is not the first to emerge from the tragedy. Earlier this year, Nancy Lemus, the widow of Detective Victor Lemus, filed her own complaint along with the couple’s two young daughters. That suit named Los Angeles County, the LA County Sheriff’s Department, Sheriff Robert Luna, Commander Thomas Giandomenico and others as defendants.
The Lemus family lawsuit makes additional allegations beyond training failures. It claims Giandomenico used his cellphone to photograph Lemus’ remains after the explosion and later distributed the images to others for non-investigative purposes. The papers further allege that Luna knew about the photographs but did not confiscate the cellphone.
Luna spoke at Lemus’ funeral, which was the last of the three victims to be held. First responders, city leaders and grieving colleagues had earlier lined the route as the bodies were transported from the facility to the LA County Medical Examiner’s office.
Rincon’s complaint seeks unnamed economic damages and demands a jury trial. The papers do not specify a dollar amount.
The three victims were inspecting the devices on the morning of July 18 when the fatal detonation occurred at the sheriff’s facility in East Los Angeles. The explosive had been transported there following its recovery from the Santa Monica apartment complex.
The Santa Monica Police Department’s request for the device’s collection, and the subsequent characterization of it as safe, form the core of Rincon’s negligence claim against the city. Her lawsuit focuses specifically on what she describes as a failure to properly investigate the device’s status before handing it off to the sheriff’s explosives team.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the city of Santa Monica were contacted for comment.