The Price of Precision

In early 1986, a North Hollywood side street was the backdrop for a tragedy that would change the world of explosives disposal forever. It began not with a bomb, but with a search for a gunman. Donald Lee Morse, a film and television makeup artist, had become the primary suspect in the shooting of a union official. On a cool February 8 morning, several LAPD investigators arrived at Morse’s single story home in to search for the weapon used in the crime. They didn’t find the gun, but inside a detached and locked garage, one of the officers reached into an old cabinet and discovered something far more volatile: two pipe bombs tethered together.

After carefully setting the one, smaller bomb he handled back down, the officers immediately called for the elite. In the world of the LAPD, that meant Detective Arleigh McCree and his partner, Officer Ronald Ball.

A clean cut, taciturn, family man, McCree was a legend, a man widely considered the “wizard” of bomb disposal. His expertise wasn’t just academic; he was a veteran of the U.S. Navy Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT). These “frogmen” were the precursors to the modern Navy SEALs, and McCree had brought that elite, high-stakes military training to the streets of Los Angeles. First helping form the earliest SWAT teams, but also handling both explosive diffusion and disposals himself, as well as commanding the training program used by…