Father and son find grenade buried in Midtown Mobile
By Shelby Myers
Click here for updates on this story
MOBILE, Alabama (WALA) — In their quest for treasure, Wiley and Wilson Blankenship usually find really old coins with their metal detector. Their most recent discovery was a little more explosive.
“The detector kind of made a really strange sound and it was showing metal but it was an odd sound,” said Wiley Blankenship.
Wilson Blankenship added, “We found a freaking hand grenade!”
About ten inches under ground, and covered in a lot mud, Wiley and Wilson said they found an World War I style hand grenade in their Midtown Mobile neighborhood.
Wiley said, “We get it out of the ground and it was like a wad of dirt and we start pulling dirt off of it and I realized, wow, I think it’s a grenade and it really kind of freaked me out to be honest with you. I told Wilson, go across the street with your mom and he was like why?”
Wiley said he put the suspected grenade down on top of the ground where he found it and called 911.
Mobile Police came out and then got their bomb squad to take a look. Wiley said crews thought it was a fake at first.
“They discovered it was really a live grenade,” said Wiley. “From the pic we took of it before police took, it appears to be a grenade they used in WW1 and used through 1960 a Mk2 style grenade. When it was put here, I don’t know, but it was old to begin with probably and it even looks older now.”
Wiley said the bomb squad has since destroyed it.
He’s not sure why it was there, but city crews have been digging around the site to put in new sidewalk in Midtown.
“Maybe someone brought it back from the war and thought, this probably isn’t something we should have in the house or in the garage even and buried it in the yard, I suppose,” said Wiley.
Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.
