SOUTH DENNIS - Luckily there were no unscheduled fireworks Saturday in South Dennis when a West Dennis couple brought a grenade to the Dennis Police Station on Bob Crowell Road around 12:30 p.m. According to Lt. Peter DiMatteo, the couple left the grenade outside the station in a bag then went inside to report it. The State Police Bomb Squad was called in and police cordoned off the front of the station and closed Bob Crowell Road to traffic. The bomb tech arrived around 2 p.m. and determined the grenade to be from the period between World War II and Vietnam, police said. According to the bomb tech, the grenade had already been disarmed and was safe. http://www.capecodtoday.com/news/CWN/2012/07/07/couple-brings-grenade-to-dennis-police-s
I don't know why such a big deal is made about grenades......they will sit and do nothing for time eternal until someone pulls the pin and lets the spoon fly. I got a "I found a grenade while cleaning out my attic" call once, and it was an M61 "lemon" grenade from the Vietnam era with the safety clip still in place. It was tempting to just unscrew the fuse and drop it off at Moon Island for the BPD Bomb Squad to deal with it, but our protocol is to evacuate the surrounding houses (even though the kill zone of a grenade is 5-10 feet), call the bomb squad, etc.
A long time ago, I was backing up a coworker on a car stop. My partner was doing a pat-down on the female while I radioed in the info for a warrant check. The look on my partner's face was priceless upon discovering the fine citizen had stashed a hand grenade in her bosom.
Like the countless A-holes who came waltzing in to the police station lobby after 9/11 during the "anthrax scare" with "suspicious envelopes" - all of which were junk mail they had been getting for years. They'd have the envelope in hand ready to shove it under the glass and they would get sent out into the parking lot with instructions to wait for the FD. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
For a while, my mother in law was cleaning all her mail with Windex before she opened it... you know, "just in case..." Sent from my wicked smaht DROID RAZR
They were cleaning out one of our evidence rooms a few years and found a box that must have belonged to an old WW11 vet it was filled with lots of Japanese trinkets including a live Japanese grenade. The box had been sitting in the station for years. The boston bomb tech said these are more dangerous than our grenades because the have a different kind of detonator. Couldn't have been too bad because he drove off with it in the back of his SUV.
Before my time (maybe Delta or Ocks can chime in) but I've heard stories of an old timer who drove a grenade back to the station to through in the dumpster. When asked what he was thinking, he replied "It's ok. I had my hand out the window."
We had a couple bring in a box of old copper detonators they found cleaning out grandpa's effects after the funeral - he was a coal miner in Pennsylvania, IIRC. They drove back with it in the trunk... one rear-ender away from disappearing in a flash of light. Bomb squad said the old ones are the most unstable. Wound up placing it carefully inside a dump truck full of sand, escorting it to a sandpit nearby, and blowing it all with C-4.
