The FBI is investigating a night explosion at a Los Angeles County church known for its anti-LGBTQ sermons, agency officials said on Saturday.
First Works Baptist Church in El Monte, California, was the site of an explosion and fire at about 1:10 am, and the FBI believes an improvised explosive device was involved, officials said.
No injuries were reported, but 14 houses and eight nearby apartments were evacuated as a precaution, El Monte police said.
“The FBI responded overnight with the El Monte Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to an IED attack on First Works Baptist Church in El Monte, CA,” the FBI said in a statement.
FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said the agency was looking at hate crime as a possible reason, but nothing was ruled out so early in the investigation.
The FBI assumes jurisdiction over possible terrorist attacks and has been particularly interested in attacks on houses of worship since the bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which killed four girls.
The El Monte church is led by pastor Bruce Mejia, whose anti-LGBTQ sermons attracted the attention of protesters and contributed to the church’s placement on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups.
Mejia did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
He called women weak and Joe Biden bad. Interracial marriage, he said, was opposed by Jesus because it involves the marriage of a pagan.
In the video of a sermon posted on YouTube in 2018, Mejia said of gay men: “When you look like someone you know is a [expletive] fully developed, they just look like a sodomite, they’re doing all these acts, you can see and say, oh, okay, they were rejected a long time ago. “
The church is the subject of a change.org petition that seeks to be recognized as a “hate group” and removed from El Monte. The city of 115,487 inhabitants in the county’s San Gabriel Valley suburb is two-thirds Latin, according to the US Census figures.
A group called Keep El Monte Friendly, who had planned a Sunday protest that was canceled, said in a statement posted on Saturday on Instragram: “We understand that what they preach can upset people. However, we would never promote, encourage, we would tolerate any violence or acts of harm. “
County supervisor Hilda Solis, former US Secretary of Labor for President Barack Obama, had previously expressed concern about the church in her district before the explosion.
“Although we still don’t know the reason, I am aware of the anti-LGBTQ + and misogynistic sermons delivered by the pastor of the First Works Baptist Church;” she said in a statement, “and my office has referred questions about the pastor to the county’s Human Rights Commission, which has been working in collaboration with the city of El Monte to reduce the situation.”
