ESCONDIDO, Calif. — In the end, there were no big explosions. No flames leaping from house to house. Just neighbors, watching anxiously as a house packed with explosives went up in flames.
All of it, thankfully, without a hitch.
The blaze devoured the ranch-style house filled with so much homemade explosive material that authorities said they had no choice but to burn it to the ground.
While the immediate safety threat had passed, residents were still haunted by the man who rented the house — George Jakubec. How did he amass so much explosive material, and what did he plan to do with it? Investigators are still trying to find those answers as Jakubec sits in jail on bomb-making and bank-robbery charges.
Authorities plan to assess the property and then bring in hazardous-material crews to remove 2 to 6 inches of topsoil from the half-acre lot to ensure no dangerous residue was left behind.
Police and prosecutors now can turn their full attention to Jakubec.
The out-of-work software consultant, 54, has pleaded not guilty to charges of making destructive devices and robbing three banks.
Jakubec rented the house for more than a year. Authorities say he filled it with enormous quantities of explosive chemicals, including the kinds used by suicide bombers and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The materials included pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, the explosive used in the 2001 airliner shoe-bombing attempt as well as airplane cargo bombs discovered last month.
Bomb experts determined the house was too dangerous to enter, so they drew up plans to burn it down.
The home was so cluttered with unstable chemicals that even bomb-disposing robots couldn’t be used to enter it for fear of setting off an explosion. Nearly every room had piles of explosive material and items related to making homemade bombs, prosecutors said.
A coffee table was found cluttered with documents and strewn with detonators, they said.
In the backyard, bomb technicians found six mason jars with highly unstable hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, which can explode if stepped on. Prosecutors said they did not know of a commercial use for it in the U.S.
The jars were discovered after a gardener accidentally set off an explosion by stepping on a byproduct of the chemical that had been on the ground, prosecutors said. Investigators said Jakubec told them he had been dumping the byproduct in the backyard.
As Shirley Abernethy, 82, watched the fire, she wondered how all of it could have happened in her neighborhood.
“Some people have crazy minds,” she said. “You just never know who you are living next to.”
