Attempted bombing may have been planned for years

At first, the detective thought the bag sitting outside the Nederland, Colo., police station was a piece of lost property that someone hoped to reunite with its owner.

But when he glanced into the bag, the detective saw a cellphone with wires connected to a battery, along with a suspicious powder.

Recognizing the bomb for what it was, the detective “carefully brought the device back outside,” court documents say. Then he rushed to evacuate the police department, a grocery store and a motel.

Investigators later found that someone had called the phone connected to the device several times, unsuccessfully trying to make it explode.

After the bomb was dismantled, local police and federal investigators turned to their most pressing questions: Who would want to bomb the five-member police department in a hippie enclave in the Colorado mountains? And why?

The investigation, court documents say, led them to 64-year-old David Michael Ansberry, a 3-foot-6 man with dwarfism and a spinal deformity, who one former law enforcement official says may have been nursing a decades-old grudge against that department.

The first step for investigators Oct. 11 was exploring the unexploded bomb. It was connected to an AT&T prepaid phone.

The phone and the number of another prepaid phone that had called it were traced to two Colorado grocery stores.

Surveillance video recovered from the stores gave investigators their first glimpse of the suspect.

“Each purchase was conducted by a short male (later learned to be 3’6?), who had a ponytail, wore a baseball hat and was using crutches,” court documents said. The man paid in cash. Mr. Ansberry, of San Rafael, California, was arrested over the weekend in Chicago, where investigators say he fled after the failed bombing.

Investigators have not indicated a motive, but the suspect may have been holding a grudge against local police for 45 years.

The former Boulder County sheriff, George Epp, told The Washington Post that a friend of Mr. Ansberry’s was fatally shot by an officer in 1971.