News

Actions

Explosion rocks St. Joseph home Independence Day morning, 1 in custody

Posted at 10:44 AM, Jul 04, 2017
and last updated 2017-07-05 14:50:11-04

One man is in custody after a large explosion Tuesday morning in St. Joseph, Missouri.

ATF agents recovered what they believe to be illegal fireworks. The components were sent to the ATF explosives laboratory for evaluation, officials said. 

The small home, located on the 1100 block of Prospect, was reduced to a pile of rubble, with a fire still burning underneath.

Neighbors pulled three people from the burning debris, two men and one woman.  Two of them are in the hospital with serious, but non-life-threatening injuries.

 

Many described hearing a loud "boom" and feeling their homes shake.  Other people said they heard it from miles away. 

"When that thing went off, it blew the whole front of the house completely away. It was gone," Carl Parham said.

Parham lives a few houses down, and described the scene as pure chaos. 

"When I come out on the front porch, I seen a wall of smoke hit me in my face and behind that smoke was fire. And I heard people screaming and yelling," Parham said.

His two granddaughters, Kyleigh and Shiloh, ran barefoot to see if they could help.

"The fire kept getting bigger and bigger, and you could see the girl, you could see her arms reaching out and then you could hear her screaming," Shiloh Holt said.

"I saw fire just everywhere and then while we were down there, it kept popping, it just kept exploding," Kyleigh Ebling said. "I couldn't believe it was happening."

Parham said his neighbors pulled the woman out of the fire and likely saved her life.

A small child lived at the house, but officials confirmed the child was not there at the time of the explosion.

ATF is helping the St. Joseph Police and fire departments investigate. The debris has to be cleared before officials can figure out the cause.

Neighbors have their own ideas about what ignited the explosion.  They told 41 Action News and investigators they think the people who lived in the house were making homemade explosives.  They say the people had been shooting off large fireworks for weeks. 

"I probably think they were because you can't buy them that big. I mean they were gigantic," one neighbor said.

Another neighbor said you could hear fireworks going off at the home at all hours the night before.

ATF Spokesperson John Ham says they are looking into illegally-made fireworks as a possibility. 

"It's too early to make that conclusion," Ham said.  "That's where we are based on witness statements only. We've got to get in the scene."

Ham said once experts can do that, it'll be fairly easy to determine a cause.

"The powder going into fireworks are sensitive. They have to be sensitive for the firework to explode. They are shock sensitive, they're friction sensitive, heat sensitive – to the point that dragging your foot on the ground can cause it to go," Ham said. 

Officials are still interviewing the people who lived in the home.