The gift was a kind one. A man in DeLand, Florida, had a neighbor whose late husband was a WWII veteran. As such, she had an interesting set of bookends made from antique pineapple-style hand grenades. She didn’t need them any more, so she gave them to her neighbor. The neighbor promptly, and foolishly, pulled the pin on one of the grenades after having a bad feeling about said grenades. The pin-pulling neighbor freaked out and called the police department, who came to the man’s house and blew up the antique grenade bookends.
“This could have been very dangerous; somebody could have lost a life,” said Sgt. Ted Richards of the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office. “If one of these were live and went off, we could have had multiple casualties.”
The bomb squad was called in and they took care of the grenades by taking them out to a nearby field and blowing them up; the resulting explosion left a two-foot-deep crater in the ground. Either the grenades were live after 60+ years of being decorations or the police went a little crazy on the detonation.
Tags: hand grenades, grenades used as bookends, live grenades used as bookends, Volusia County, Florida, Ted Richards, active grenades used as bookends, live grenades used as decoration, DeLand, unusual decorations, bomb squad called in to blow up grenade bookends, bookends