Four East Baton Rouge teens arrested for building, throwing homemade bombs

This wasn’t just a run of the mill Saturday night when teens start tossing bombs like they were firecrackers.  

The Advocatereports four local teens accused of spending their Friday night building small bombs using a few household items, including aluminum foil and Gatorade bottles, then tossing them at people and houses, have been arrested.

East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s deputies on Saturday booked Blaine Burkett, 17, 16228 Chevernt Ave., Greenwell Springs, into Parish Prison on three counts of contributing to the delinquency of juveniles and counts of manufacturing and possessing a bomb, prison records show.

The three others, whose names were not released, each were booked into the East Baton Rouge Parish Juvenile Detention Center on counts of manufacturing and possessing a bomb, sheriff’s spokeswoman Casey Rayborn Hicks said.

The Sheriff’s Office did not say where or how the four learned to make the bombs.

An affidavit of probable cause, which is Burkett’s arrest document, gave this account:

Burkett told deputies that he and the others were playing “ding-dong-ditch” — a game in which a person knocks on someone’s door, then runs — when the other three decided to go to a nearby store to buy supplies to build a “homemade explosive device,” the affidavit of probable cause said.

One minor, identified only as “GA,” bought aluminum foil and Gatorade, while another, identified as “TM,” bought household cleaners and eggs, the affidavit said.

The four teens drove to an unidentified BREC park and built and exploded two test devices. Burkett said they wanted to make sure the various chemicals reacted properly with each other and would explode, according to the affidavit.

They built and exploded two more bombs before egging several parked cars at the park. Before they left, they built two more bombs.

“The second set of bombs were thrown at a group of people at their residence (unknown address) while they sat around a fire in the backyard,” the arrest document said.

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