Woman Gives Officer Grenade

A police officer on his dinner break on Ventura Boulevard Sunday evening got an unwelcome present from a woman who approached him.

“She reached under her jacket and said to him, ‘You should have this,’ ” said Sgt. Cliff Boyer of the Los Angeles Police Department.

“Then she handed him a grenade that had the spoon and the pin still in it.”

The woman told the officer that the grenade was left behind by her boyfriend when he left the country, Boyer said. The officer immediately called the bomb squad.

Additional police arriving at the scene cordoned off a two-block area just west of the intersection of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevards. Several restaurants in the area were evacuated.

But when the bomb squad blew the cap off the grenade, it turned out to be an empty casing--”just a dud,” Boyer said.

Police arrested two people who refused to leave the area while the bomb squad was at work.