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Man accused of making bomb in sushi restaurant

DES MOINES, Iowa — A man in Iowa says he wanted to make a point by allegedly assembling a bomb in plain sight. Police say he did that at a sushi restaurant in Des Moines Tuesday night.

The owner of the Akebono restaurant, Nam Tran, was busy creating sushi dishes when he found out a customer was sitting in a booth by the window, creating a dish of his own. It was a homemade hand grenade.

"I had no idea. I had no idea," Tran told KCCI. "There was a bomb in my restaurant! That crazy!"

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Des Moines police say that customer is Ivory Washington. Washington called 911 dispatchers to tell them he was at the restaurant making the deadly explosive. At first, he claimed it was fake.

"It was legit. We tested it to see if it would explode. It did," said Sgt. Paul Parizek. Parizek says the suspect claimed he wanted to see if anybody would notice. "He gave us a story where he is extremely frustrated with our world today and believes that people don't take these types of threats seriously. So he was going to make a point that he could sit somewhere and construct a device and hopefully, somebody would call police."

Tran and other employees say they noticed Washington acting strange. "He kept wandering around different tables, sit down. Go to the electric outlet and plug in some device, a phone jack or something. And go up to the bar a few times and ask to throw some trash away," said Tran.

Tran says police spent a lot of time questioning Washington in the restaurant, but they never closed.

"If you see something suspicious, give us a call because had this device gone off in that restaurant, anybody that was inside of that restaurant would have been injured," said Parizek.

Washington was later charged with possession of an explosive material.