Brian Miller never told anyone why he was making mortars and rockets in his back yard, but ever since they blew up, fireworks have been an explosive subject in Lakewood

PHOTO COURTESY of STEVE KRAWCZUK

Clocks in people’s homes marked the zero hour differently, but officially it was “at about 6:50 a.m.” on Sunday, March 5, 2006, when Brian Miller’s house in Lakewood blew up.

“That’s my house. I live there,” Miller told the first lawman to arrive at the southeast corner where Dunrobin Avenue dead-ends into Ashworth Street. The People’s case against him describes Miller as “pointing to the burning house,” which was entirely unnecessary. You could see it burn, smell the acrid smoke, hear the explosions still going off and feel debris rain down.

“I was smoking a cigarette on my back patio when my fireworks exploded,” Miller told that unlucky first Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy. In Lakewood, which still considers itself very much a family town, Miller—a 36-year-old father of two who reportedly did something with computers—had just made what was probably the understatement of the year.

Twenty-eight months later, the repercussions of what happened when his massive cache of illegal homemade fireworks detonated are still being felt in this quiet residential neighborhood.

Lakewood is a city whose calculated construction in the years after World War II still epitomizes serene suburbia. Silhouetted against its backdrop, a man like Brian Miller—defined more by the lonely pursuit of an explosive hobby than by family, job or church—doesn’t make sense. He is contrary to popular belief.

Which isn’t to say that Miller and his family didn’t try to fit in. They did. He was always ready to help change a light bulb, and she—his wife, Kristina—worked at the Vons nearby. But after their house exploded, blending in was impossible.

Miraculously, no one was seriously injured by the explosions—which hurled the Millers’ hot water heater cabinet and at least one pair of scissors high in the air (neighbor Yvette Santos found those scissors embedded in her roof)—or by the fire that charred part of their house. But after Brian’s fireworks exploded, two neighbors’ dogs died—though the Millers’ two dogs reportedly survived unscathed. Homes on the two streets were wrecked—walls buckled, windows shattered, doorjambs splintered—and none more than the Millers’ house.

The blasts knocked their 1940s bungalow off its foundation and blew its roof up like in a cartoon: it fell right back down in place—though, this being the real world, it was ruined. Their house was a rental, and so the ultimate responsibility for rebuilding it fell to someone else.

And of course, Brian’s fireworks were the sole cause of all this destruction—a fact The People made abundantly clear.

Miller pled no contest and was convicted of nine felonies, including child endangerment (sons Michael, 7, and Scott, 3) and possessing illegal explosives. He was sentenced to four years in prison, and, upon his reported early release this year, was required to pay a total of $254,329.56 in restitution to his former landlord and three neighbors.

There was also this stipulation: “Court orders defendant is not to return to the neighborhood or within one mile of that neighborhood to live or visit for any reason.”

As someone who made his own fireworks, Brian Miller had always seemed like a man apart, but he was so willing to share himself and his time—and his aerial displays, clouds of smoke and loud noises—that his pastime could sometimes be overlooked. In the months after his stash blew up, it became clear just how different he was.

Brian’s pyrotechnical disaster destroyed more than his house. It undermined the community’s sense of itself—made neighbors uneasy with one another. It pitted The People against their government. And, maybe least of all, the explosions hurt Brian Miller. He was treated March 5 for second- and third-degree burns to the back of his neck and arms, and then arrested once the hospital released him.

Neighbors who’d been friendly before Brian stepped outside for a smoke on March 5 now stopped talking to each other. They blamed each other and the city of Lakewood and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for not doing something about him. Even as insurance companies paid and contractors rebuilt their houses, worried homeowners lost their sense of place. Some moved away.

Oddly, perhaps, they didn’t seem to blame the Millers all that much, but emanating from that burned-out house came the overwhelming feeling that nothing would ever be the same again.

* * *

“This is always the neighborhood that I wanted to live in. I never expected this to happen here,” says Brian Miller’s next-door neighbor Yvette Santos, the lady with the scissors in her roof. She’s a local—grew up in Bellflower and went to Lakewood’s Mayfair High School, where fireworks sales are still a great fundraiser. But Brian Miller’s homemade mortars and rockets were a thorn in the Santos family’s side from the moment they moved in, in 2005.

“This was an ongoing battle with him since we bought the house,” Santos says. She and other neighbors say he exploded fireworks, sometimes every day for several days, several times each day. Sometimes, “if somebody talked to him, he would wait two to three days before starting again,” Santos says. After a year of constant infighting, the events of March 5, 2006, still hit her like, well, a bomb.

“When I first woke up, I actually thought there was a war or something. I never would have thought it was fireworks,” says the mother of two. “And then I got up and I kind of realized there was glass all over the floor and I was cutting my feet.” She saw fire and fireworks out the window and realized she had to get sons Austin and Nick, husband Albert and her mother—and get out of the house.

“My youngest one had flames on his blanket from all the fireworks that were coming in the window and my other son was covered in glass,” Santos remembers.

The blasts broke every window in her house, and peppered it with everything from that pair of scissors to the Millers’ metal patio awning, both of which ended up on the Santos’ roof. The Santos’ house had to be re-stuccoed. It needed virtually all new furniture, windows, paint, landscaping—and, of course, a new roof.

The whole ordeal cost them more than $15,000, Santos says, and “we still don’t have any grass in the back because the insurance company was saying that’s not something they cover.” During the one year she knew him, her former neighbor was tight-lipped about his hobby, she says: “He never gave me a reason why he did it.”

* * *

When Bob Kent heard the first explosion that Sunday morning, he had no idea what it was.

“I didn’t realize it was fireworks,” Kent says, showing me photographs of the damage to their intersection—the trim around his front windows splintered, the Millers’ house, directly across Ashworth Street, charred and disheveled, its fence flattened, and debris strewn across the street.

Kent was rounding the corner of the bed when he says he and his wife heard a second explosion—and he was just reaching the living room when the third report rolled out across the intersection. If he’d been a little faster on his feet, Kent might have joined Miller at Lakewood Regional Medical Center that day.

“I just missed getting killed. The third one just sounded like a bomb going off,” he says. “A fireball came through the window. It looked like a war zone out here in front that morning.”

The explosions broke eight windows in the Kents’ house, blew open their front door, and showered everything in range with shards of glass. His wall clock stopped at 6:55 a.m., but Kent refuses to throw it out. “I started messing with it and now it works sometimes,” he says. “But it’s not right.”

He figures the whole experience only cost him about $500—the deductible on his homeowner’s policy—but the psychic toll was much higher.

“I knew him very, very well. Let’s put it that way,” says Kent, a former U.S. Navy tanker. He recalls his former neighbor as helpful and friendly, an all-American type who could make anything work, whether it was computers or Roman candles or something as multidisciplinary as a house.

“He helped me with my fireplace and he helped me put a motion [sensing] light out in my backyard—the old light bulb was hard to get out,” Kent says. “And he helped me with some plumbing and some electrical.”

Some evenings, Kristina Miller would come sit on the Kents’ brick front porch and chat with his wife, Kent says. Then on July 4th—well, you know.

“He would have three hours of fireworks every year on the Fourth of July,” Kent says. “Everybody watched.” Miller’s family moved out, but the question of what kind of people they really were—and why the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Arson and Explosives Detail removed 400 pounds of unexploded fireworks from their back yard and less than an ounce of methamphetamine from their house—lingered in everyone’s mind.

“I never went on the property,” Kent says, his brusque, old-guy delivery making it sound believable. “I didn’t know he had a cache of fireworks over in his yard.”

And he liked him.

“I liked the guy. He was a nice guy,” Kent says. “The last time I saw him, he was running down the street and neighbors were yelling, ‘Catch him! Catch him! There he goes!’”

* * *

“I saw his wife and I started yelling, and then I stopped and I wondered—‘Are they all right?’” Beth Krawczuk remembers.

The Krawczuks—Beth, Steve and baby Jasmine—lived on Ashworth Street, too, two doors west of Bob Kent. They’d seen Brian Miller shoot off fireworks again and again, and they’d complained to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which patrols Lakewood, only to be told, they say, that Sheriff’s deputies had to actually catch Miller in the act. So, at the deputies’ suggestion, the Krawczuks started photographing their neighbor whenever they heard an explosion or saw a telltale cloud of smoke rise from his back yard. It kept them pretty busy.

“He set off fireworks every day,” Beth Krawczuk says.

“His personality, the way he is, I think it was just fun,” says Steve Krawczuk. “It was a fun thing to do.” They still think about something their neighbor said, back in 2005.

“Around the corner from Brian, there was a house being built—it was just a frame and plywood,” Beth Krawczuk remembers. “One night, my window is just solid red—the biggest inferno I have ever seen, and I am like, ‘Oh, my gosh!’ This house went up in the hugest inferno in a second.

“We’re standing [outside], Brian comes over and he’s like, ‘Do you hear that wood? Do you hear that? There’s an accelerant in there.’ Steve and I just looked at each other like, ‘Holy cow! He’s way too into fire.’”

“He could have just been speculating,” Steve Krawczuk says.

“We never thought he did it,” Beth Krawczuk says. But that spring morning in 2006, they couldn’t help remembering. The March 5 blasts blew out the Krawczuks’ front windows, slightly injuring Steve, who couldn’t sleep and had gotten up early to watch TV on the living room sofa. Their front doorjamb fractured, a window frame in the back of the house shook loose from the wall—and the metal door to the Millers’ hot water heater cabinet went shooting across Ashworth.

“This huge door that looked like the Incredible Hulk punched it in the middle, flew through the air and over our fence, and landed in the middle of our driveway,” Steve Krawczuk says.

The couple told me all this in a telephone conversation from their native New Jersey, where they relocated that spring. “It really just prompted us to haul ass out of there,” Beth Krawczuk says.

“It really affected us.” Baby Jasmine was just a year old—and for a few terrible moments that Sunday morning, Beth Krawczuk lost her.

“I forgot that I had brought my daughter into bed with me and I ran into her room to get her out of bed. She wasn’t in her crib and I completely freaked out,” Beth Krawczuk says. “She was less than two at the time—so very new to me and our only child—and I thought, ‘How am I going to protect my child?’ I thought it was a terrorist attack. It just felt like imminent death.”

And it didn’t stop in the days after. “Every loud sound I heard, I just kept thinking it was going to escalate into some loud explosion,” Beth Krawczuk says. “I kind of suffer from anxiety a little bit, anyway. I would come home and say, ‘Let’s get out of here.’”

So, on Memorial Day 2006, the Krawczuks drove back home to New Jersey to stay—and then Steve Krawczuk drove back to Southern California alone to sell their house. “It really upset me. I was pissed off ’cause I loved that friggin’ house,” Steve Krawczuk says. “I didn’t want to be beaten by that, but I was having a really hard time convincing myself that we could be happy again.”

Like Bob Kent, they didn’t blame Brian Miller. The Krawczuks even boarded one of his dogs at their house until the Millers relocated.

“It was weird. We had a hard time being angry at him,” Beth Krawczuk says. “And we’re certainly not going to get angry at his dog. We were more upset at the city of Lakewood than Brian.”

“We were okay with him. I felt like he made many poor decisions, but I didn’t want money,” Steve Krawczuk says. “I felt like he was suffering enough.”

* * *

Not everyone felt that way.

“It was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard,” says attorney Steve Hansen, whose parents, Dale and Priscilla Hansen, live about a block from the Miller house. In the months afterward, they and fellow neighbors, the Hildebrandts, each lost a pet dog to heart troubles they attributed to Brian Miller.

“I heard the explosion,” says Hansen, who lives in Lakewood, about a mile from his folks. “It woke me up. My brother called me and said, ‘He’s done it. He’s blown his house up.’”

They’d been expecting it for years, and now that it had happened, they figured the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s justice would be swift and merciless.

“The Sheriff’s, boy, one thing they do is they shut the barn door really good after the horse gets out,” says Hansen, who helped start a website in mid-2006 called the Lakewood Accountability Action Group at www.laag.us. Laag.us has a general function—to spotlight city and government issues—and a very specific one: to make sure Miller didn’t simply get released with credit for time served.

“He was selling [fireworks]. And part of what he would do is set them off all during the year, to test them,” Hansen says. “But they could never . . . ”—and here he waves his hands to indicate that the Sheriff’s Department could never prove it. Miller was never convicted of selling fireworks, but ultimately, his sentence more than satisfied Hansen.

“He got jammed. He got jammed really bad,” says the attorney. “That was a big sentence for fireworks. Hopefully that sentence taught him a lot.”

But Hansen doesn’t hold a grudge, either.

“Miller was a criminal. I don’t blame the criminals so much as I blame the people who are supposed to stop them,” he says. He thinks the Sheriff’s Department could have—should have—caught Miller years before that—like maybe on July 4, 2005. That’s when Hansen says Miller set off a row of mortars outside his house as the Hansens watched.

“He was so brazen. My brother was just laughing,” Hansen says. “He’s like, ‘I guess the Sheriff’s Department can’t see this.’ We called the Sheriff’s Department three times and never saw a car.”

* * *

“I suppose we have a very long tradition of having fun with loud noises,” Lakewood spokesman Don Waldie says, struggling to sum up our country’s 232-year-old association of big bangs with big fun. In Lakewood, which walks a thin line on fireworks, that’s not so easy.

Four days of legal safe-and-sane fireworks sales are sometimes the year’s biggest fundraiser for local chapters of the Rotary Club and the Knights of Columbus, and various groups at Mayfair, Lakewood and Artesia high schools like the cheerleaders, the alumni, and whoever puts on grad night. And yet there will always be men like Steve Hansen, who says, “Patriotism doesn’t involve that.”

“That’s Fourth of July, that’s the Super Bowl, that’s the kid’s soccer game. We like to celebrate with loud noise,” says Waldie, who represents a city where fireworks are legally sold from July 1 to 4 only—and legally exploded from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. July 4. Only.

“Mr. Miller was a special case of a fireworks hobbyist, and [he] taught us a lesson that we haven’t forgotten three Fourth of Julys later,” Waldie says. The men and women of the Lakewood Sheriff’s station—which will dedicate 50 extra personnel just to enforcing fireworks laws this Friday—haven’t forgotten, either.

* * *

After two years, the man who ran Lakewood Sheriff’s station from March 2002 to March 2008 still sounds chagrined that they didn’t catch Brian Miller in the act.

“There wasn’t enough [evidence]. The deputies didn’t have enough to go into the house. There was one call where residents turned over some [rocket] launchers, debris and stuff, and there was a criminal report taken,” says Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Cmdr. David Fender, who was promoted and reassigned four months ago.

And what happened to that criminal report? It got put on the back-burner and, eventually, the deputy responsible was disciplined. After Miller’s house went up, the city put a measure banning all fireworks on the November 2006 ballot. It failed.

“People are torn on it. It’s not just a fundraiser. People recall back to their childhood and they want that same experience for their children,” Fender says. “I understand both sides of the issue. It’s really up to every community to decide what they want.”

* * *

So what does the city of Lakewood want? More money? Well, yeah. As of June 24, any scofflaws caught misusing their legally purchased fireworks—or using illegal fireworks in Lakewood—will face city fines of anywhere from $100 to $1,000, plus all the usual infraction, misdemeanor or felony charges. (“Scofflaws” is a word that Waldie uses repeatedly to describe fireworks abusers.)

And what about residents? Are they still comfortable blowing shit up under The Man’s watchful eye? Well, yes, some are—like Brian Miller’s next-door neighbor.

“I grew up with fireworks and I’d like my family to grow up with fireworks. I think it’s a tradition,” Yvette Santos says, admitting, “We have other traditions that are more important.”

But back in New Jersey, former Lakewoodians Steve and Beth Krawczuk are divided on the issue.

“I still like fireworks. I think they’re neat,” he says. “I wish they didn’t have to be banned.”

“I think it’s kind of like playing with guns,” she says. “And I wish that Lakewood would ban them. I think it’s equivalent to selling cigarettes to minors.”

Bob Kent doesn’t like ’em, which makes you wonder how he tolerated Brian Miller for so long.

“I wish they would abandon the fireworks, but they voted against it,” says Kent, a native of Clarinda, Iowa, where they frowned on fireworks, too. “We didn’t have ’em,” he says, “but they would go down to the Missouri border and bring ’em back.”

And what does Brian Miller think? He never really said much in court about what compelled him to mass-produce hundreds of pounds of fireworks, and I never got the chance to ask him—even though I traced him to a neat Orange County townhouse, listed in court records as his home since his release. No one ever answered the door or returned my calls.

Miller’s attorney, Scott B. Well of Anaheim Hills, says his client is “certainly is not the type of person who would ever intend harm against anyone”—but that’s not quite how it worked out. Wells also has this to say: “I think I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t interested in fireworks when I was a boy,” the attorney confesses. “I think it’s a normal fascination for guys who like to build stuff.”

Maybe so; it’s just that after a while, most of them grow up.

Tags: brian miller, Don Waldie, fireworks, fourth of july, lakewood