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PACE, Fla. – An 8-year-old boy and his friend found a live, World War II-era hand grenade while searching for buried treasure with a metal detector.
Sidney Mathis and his friend had found nails, bolts and a toy car by sweeping the detector over a field near their home Thursday. But it was their other find that alarmed Sidney’s father, Chris Mathis.
He arrived home Thursday to find the boys about to put the grenade into a bucket of water. Chris Mathis grabbed the grenade and dangled it outside the window of his sport utility vehicle as he drove away from the apartment complex.
Mathis had second thoughts.
“I hit a bump and that’s about the time I realized moving the grenade wasn’t the brightest thing to do,” he said.
Two members of an Air Force explosives unit from nearby Hurlburt Field in the Florida Panhandle took the grenade and destroyed it Friday morning.