What would you do if you found a grenade with the pin pulled?
Seriously, because that's the situation 9-year-old Kolton Decker faced while out magnet fishing with his dad in Moore County.
CBS 17 News first reported Kolton and his father, a retired special forces soldier, were using the magnet to search for items off Morrison Bridge, which crosses the Little River last Monday when Kolton snagged something unexpected.
"Once I pulled it out of there I was like, 'Hey dad, I think I found a grenade," Kolton told the station.
As a retired soldier, Kolton's father recognized the severity of the situation and alerted authorities, who closed off the road to allow the experts to deal with the situation. They found that the pin was pulled on the device.
"It was in a very dangerous state for any regular civilian to be handling," Fort Bragg bomb expert Staff Sgt. Drew Dobbs told the news station.
He was involved with a controlled detonation to destroy the device. That detonation left a sizable hole in the ground. Dobbs told the station it could have been deadly if someone had been holding the grenade.
There's a little bit of irony here in the reason Kolton's mother Renee bought him the magnet fishing set for Christmas.
"I thought it would be a fun safe thing that him and his dad could do together," she told the news station.
Thankfully, the story has a positive ending, much to Renee Decker's relief.
"God was watching over him and protecting both of them because, really, I could have lost both of them if they would have been standing close to each other and it had gone off. So, I'm just very thankful," she told the station.
Dobbs and other authorities have no explanation for how the grenade ended up in the creek in the first place. Strangely enough, discoveries of explosives and explosive lookalikes in unexpected locations are not all that uncommon. Things like claymore dummy rounds have been found in rivers. Civil war munitions were even found in a library a few years ago.
Three years ago, a woman in Idaho found a live World War II-era Nazi artillery shell while cleaning out her backyard shed. The best thing to do if you find yourself in a similar situation is to alert authorities who can bring out trained bomb disposal experts to handle the device.
For more outdoor content from Travis Smola, be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his Geocaching and Outdoors with Travis YouTube channels.
NEXT: CLAYMORES AND DETONATOR FOUND IN UNDERWATER TREASURE HUNT
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