Police find bombs in Arizona home of dead man blamed for Nevada blasts

By David Schwartz

PHOENIX (Reuters) – Police in Arizona have uncovered a cache of explosives and make-shift bombs in the mobile home belonging to a car bomb suspect killed earlier this week in rural Nevada, when the device he was carrying in his vehicle detonated, authorities said on Friday.

Roughly 100 residents of the Zuni Village RV Park in Kingman, Arizona, were ordered evacuated Thursday as bomb squad technicians began to search the dwelling and storage shed of the suspect, Glenn Franklin Jones, police said.

Jones, 59, described by Nevada authorities as a disgruntled former hospital worker, was believed responsible for two bomb blasts on Wednesday night that rocked the tiny farming community of Panaca in southeastern Nevada, near the Utah border.

One bomb went off in the car Jones was driving, killing him, and a second device exploded at a nearby home, damaging the residence, but authorities said there were no other serious injuries.

Investigators sent to Jones’ residence at the RV park in northwestern Arizona on Thursday morning found “a significant amount of explosives” in his motor home, said Rusty Cooper, deputy chief of the Kingman police department.

The materials seized included numerous home-made bombs in various stages of construction, Cooper said.

Bomb technicians on Friday expanded their search to Jones’ storage unit, put police later said nothing dangerous was found inside and they expected to finish their sweep of Jones’ motor home by day’s end.

Jones, who had lived at the Arizona trailer park for several months, had worked as night nurse at the Grover C. Dils Medical Center in the Nevada town of Caliente, just south of Panaca.

He apparently had targeted the house of a married couple who also worked as nurses at the hospital, one of them as the nursing director.

(Editing by Steve Gorman and Andrew Hay)