A man in Richmond, VA, found a grenade while doing yard work on Tuesday afternoon.
“I was on one of the trees and I was hitting towards the base and I hit something really hard,” Joe Priester said. “I pull it out and I’m looking at it and I can’t believe what I’m seeing… It looked like a grenade.”
He used an “ax to clear ivy near the bottom of a tree.” The ax even hit the grenade a few times.
“I know I’m not supposed to touch a bomb, but I didn’t know until I had it in my hand,” he continued. “And I saw the pin was on it so I said the best thing to do was to get it as far away as I can from anybody else and call it in. So I didn’t think about it. I was in shock.”
The police and bomb squad arrived to clear the scene. They blocked off the street for five hours.
They will not investigate the grenade since it “could’ve been left in the ground for decades.”