Bomb Death Linked to Oregon Water Dispute

A legal dispute over water rights on adjacent Oregon ranches may have led an Orange County man to plant a bomb in the car of a rival landowner, only to die when the bomb went off accidentally, a friend of one of the men said Saturday.

Ansel Young, 59, of Santa Ana “went berserk” when an Oregon judge recently ruled against him in a water rights conflict with Harold Vincent of El Toro, a business acquaintance of Vincent said. “He was very bitter over the defeat . . . it must have been a tough thing.”

Young, a certified public accountant, died Friday when a bomb he had apparently tried to plant in Vincent’s car near his Laguna Hills office exploded, police reported. Vincent, 59, who was working in the office at the time, was not hurt.

On Saturday, Young’s family members agreed that both men had been obsessed with the ranching dispute, but they said they doubted that Young would have threatened his adversary with a bomb.

“Ansel wasn’t stupid . . . he wouldn’t have done something like that,” said Donna Rojewski, Young’s sister-in-law. “If you want to know the truth, we suspect that he met with foul play.”

The dispute apparently surfaced several years ago when the two men began quarreling over water ownership rights on 200 acres of ranch property near Medford, Ore. Vincent, a retired Marine Corps major general, became angry when Young “plowed in” an irrigation ditch that effectively cut off his water supply, a friend of Vincent said.

“It’s a longstanding dispute,” said the friend, who asked not to be identified. “Up there, your whole life depends on water and you’ve got to have it, especially when the water rights on his (Vincent’s) ranch were deeded as early as 1876.”

Vincent took the matter to court, winning a restraining order and later an injunction compelling Young to keep the water ditch open while the issue was decided. Last week, a judge ruled in Vincent’s favor on the matter, the friend said.

Vincent, who declined to comment Friday when reached at his El Toro home, was spending the rest of the weekend at his Oregon ranch to take care of business matters, the friend added.

Rojewski, however, said that Vincent had not won the legal battle, saying the court “threw out the whole issue” and that neither man could claim a victory. She added that Vincent had tried to bully her brother-in-law during the dispute.

About Young, she said: “He wasn’t the kind of man who would go and do stupid things. He’d do things more legally. And the proof is he did go to court in Oregon.”

A colleague who worked with Young in his accounting office said Saturday that Young “is just about the last person I would have ever suspected” of planting a bomb.

Sheriff’s investigators, however, suspect that Young tried to plant a bomb in Vincent’s 1968 Dodge Dart. The bomb went off about 8 a.m., several minutes after Vincent arrived for work at Double “O” Enterprises, which sells National Football League accessories to the Marine Corps.

Witnesses told county Fire Department officials that moments before the bomb went off, a man was seen approaching the parked car with a briefcase. Police have not identified the kind of explosives used to make the bomb.