Forty years ago, a Palestinian-American activist was killed in Santa Ana. The case remains unsolved

Alex Odeh was killed at age 41, and decades later he loomed large in Orange County’s consciousness.

One morning in the fall of 1985, the prominent Palestinian activist arrived at work at the Santa Ana offices of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. As he opened the door to the civil rights organization, a rigged pipe bomb exploded, fatally wounding him.

“How could I forget that terrible day?” said Michel Shehadeh, who succeeded Odeh as West Coast regional director of the organization, which was founded in 1980 to combat anti-Arab stereotypes in American media. “Fear spreads like fire through the community.”

Shehad recalled mourners filing into a church in Orange for Odeh’s funeral, quietly discussing whether the attacks would continue and how to protect the community.

Shehade described Odeh as a slight man with a calm personality, soft-spoken and a lover of poetry. He remembers thinking, “Why this guy?”

“He posed no threat, not in the way he looked, the way he acted or the way he spoke,” Shehade said.

Forty years later, Ord’s murder remains unsolved. For many Palestinians and other Arabs in Southern California, his death is a brutal reminder of the discrimination the community faces.

But he’s also a symbol of resilience. His memory is a call to action that has taken on new meaning in recent years.

Last year, as a wave of student activism against Israel’s war in Gaza spread across college campuses across the United States, students at the University of California, Irvine, amid protest chants and drumbeats, raised banners on campus buildings declaring the site “Alex Ord Hall.”

“The whole narrative around Palestine has changed. People are taking to the streets,” Shehade said. “It’s a different world.”

However, he said the backlash against his community continues.

The detention this year of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate, reminded Shehade of his own arrest by federal agents in 1987.

Shehade was one of eight people arrested for pro-Palestinian activities and threatened with deportation, even though he immigrated to the United States legally as a teenager and was a grocery store employee living in Long Beach.

“History repeats itself,” Shehade said.

Hostile encounters are almost commonplace, especially for those who are politically active.

Hind Baki and Odeh worked together at the Santa Ana office, first as interns and then as full-time employees fresh out of college, and often received threatening phone calls.

Buckey said Ord was “very matter-of-fact about it” and told her to record the call and report it to police.

She remembers him saying: “They often call my home too, but don’t worry, they don’t dare to do anything in the United States.”

When she started receiving threatening calls at home, she told her parents she was shocked. But Odd assured her it was just talk.

After the explosion, the calls continued as Bucky moved what few boxes of documents she could salvage from her office to a makeshift office in Los Angeles. That’s when she decided to look for another job.

William Lafi Youmans, co-creator of a documentary investigating Odd’s death, said he heard Odd’s story growing up in Detroit and thought it was a cautionary tale about the dangers of being too outspoken.

“It’s a bit of a warning,” Youmans said. “It’s sad because whoever killed Alex tried to silence the community.”

The film was completed two years ago, just before the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and took 251 Israelis hostage.

Youmans gave up hope of getting the documentary into film festivals amid rising anti-Palestinian sentiment, despite Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

To mark the anniversary of Ord’s death, Youmans and his co-creators hosted a private screening of the film in Costa Mesa on Friday night and updated the process for submitting it to film festivals.

The FBI investigation into the bombing is ongoing and the names of three suspects have been publicly released in the media. Authorities said they will continue to seek the public’s help.

“The investigation into the murder of Alex Ord has lasted for generations, but the FBI has never given up and will continue to investigate new leads in this case,” Akil Davis, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said in a statement.

Davis said the U.S. Department of Justice has long offered a reward of up to $1 million for information leading to an arrest and conviction.

“I’m confident we’ll find out,” Davis said.

Helena, the eldest of Ord’s three daughters, said she missed her father all the time.

“It’s still painful,” she said. “Another decade has passed and we are still waiting for justice. Our lives have grown and prospered, but we did not have our father present to see it all happen.”

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee holds an annual banquet in Odeh’s honor at the Garden Grove Hotel. Earlier this year, the company opened an office in Anaheim’s Little Arabia neighborhood for the first time since the Santa Ana bombing.

The organization’s leadership asked Helena to become its first full-time employee, but the trauma of her father’s assassination gave her pause.

“What if I go to work one day and don’t come home?” Helena said.

After talking to her family, she turned down the job.