Hays Post

ELLIS — Explosives experts destroyed a homemade explosive device Tuesday night that led to a block of Ellis to be evacuated.

Ellis Police Chief Taft Yates said the incident began after 8:30 a.m. Tuesday in the 500 block of East 15th when officers attempted to serve an adult male with an arrest warrant for failure to appear from another jurisdiction.

The suspect requested to recover something inside the residence, and the officer accompanied him into the home, Yates said. The officer reported smelling the odor of marijuana, and then investigated by interviewing the suspect and an adult female also in the residence.

The adult male was arrested on the warrant, while the female handed the officer a small bag of what is believed to be marijuana and also was arrested.

The Ellis Police Department requested and was granted a search warrant for the home by a district judge and executed that warrant just after 2 p.m.

“At about 2:30 p.m., they found what we believed to be a non-electric homemade explosive device,” Yates said.

Officers photographed the device and sent information to the bomb unit of the Kansas Highway Patrol, which made its way to Ellis and urged with EPD to cordon off the area.

“They wanted to evacuate the immediate area for precaution because they were going to be moving this device around,” Yates said.

The device, he said, was “what most people consider a pipe bomb” and was about 4.5 inches long with a 2.5-inch diameter.

“It had a type of fuse coming out of one end … capped on the other end and epoxied,” he said.

The device was taken to a range east of town where the bomb unit destroyed the device in a “non-explosive manner.”

“We didn’t have a big boom,” Yates said.

Officers completed another sweep of the residence, garage and a vehicle to ensure there was no secondary explosive device, he said. Residents were allowed to return to the area about 8:30 p.m.

Charges are pending against the two individuals, whose names were not released due to the pending investigation.