A 56-year-old man was jailed Thursday on “suspicion of reporting a false emergency” after a bomb squad was called to a Garden Grove convenience store to investigate a suspicious car parked in the lot.
Jonny Knowles walked into the 7-Eleven at 13472 Euclid St. about 11 a.m. Wednesday and asked if there were cameras because he wanted them to catch “what happens,” according to Lt. Carl Whitney of the Garden Grove Police Department.
An employee saw Knowles’ newer-model white Ford Mustang in the parking lot with a fertilizer tank in the driver’s seat and hoses and other items coming out of the car, which also had some sort of message written on it, and called police, Whitney said.
Knowles, of Garden Grove, left the store and dropped a jug containing liquid and a hose in front of the nearby Euclid Nursery, 13352 S. Euclid St., he said.
Police shut down traffic in the area around Euclid Avenue and Trask Street and evacuated businesses, according to Whitney, who said an Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s bomb squad used a robot to analyze the car. He said the explosives experts examined the devices and determined they “were not improvised explosive devices.”
Just after 2 p.m., police tracked down Knowles in backyard of a home in the 11000 block of Crosby Avenue and took him into custody, Whitney said. Knowles did not live at the home and was acting “paranoid” and was showing signs of being under the influence of narcotics.
“A neighbor called and said there was a suspicious guy in the backyard hiding,” he said. “We got there and determined it was the same guy who walked away from the 7-Eleven store.” Knowles was also positively identified by witnesses.
Streets in the area were opened back up to traffic around 4 p.m.