The Santa Barbara Courthouse emptied this morning around 8 o'clock after a regular visitor spotted a briefcase covered with tape wedged underneath a bench. Robert LaBarge told reporters he'd seen the suspicious-looking package when he was walking down a hallway toward the men's room and informed a clerk in the courthouse about it.
Attorneys and visitors waited outside the courthouse while Sheriff's bailiffs taped off the entryways, awaiting the bomb squad's arrival. This report will be updated as information becomes available.
[Update: May 3, 2019, 10:51 a.m.] A couple hours after the call came in to the Sheriff's bomb squad unit, officers rolled out a robot, which was remotely piloted into the courthouse to examine the briefcase. Several hundred people had been evacuated, Sheriff's spokesperson Kelly Hoover said. The robot was x-raying the briefcase as part of its examination, Hoover said, and the evacuation could be lifted within the hour if the package was benign.