An explosion caused by a hand grenade discovered among a relative’s possessions resulted in the death of a father and the injury of his two children.
On Saturday night in Lakes of the Four Seasons, Indiana, a gated neighbourhood just outside of Gary, Bryan Niedert, 47, was emptying up the house of a family grandfather with his two teenage children.
The group discovered the hand grenade at the house at 6.30 p.m. According to the investigators, the weapon’s pin was pulled, which set it off.
Sheriff’s deputies rushed to the scene after the explosion rocked the quiet neighborhood.
Niedert was killed in the blast, the Lake County Coroner’s Office said. His exact cause of death will be determined by an autopsy.
His two children, a 14-year-old boy and 18-year-old girl, were hospitalized with shrapnel wounds.
The Porter County Bomb Squad responded to the scene as well to search the home for any other explosives.
Investigators with the Lake County Sheriff’s Office are ‘looking into whether the device may have self detonated due to its age or other factors, whether the pin was pulled or whether any other circumstance may have been involved,’ the department said in a news release.
This is not the first incident involving an unexploded grenade this year.
In East Devon, a nine-year-old boy dug up a grenade dating back to World War II in his family’s garden.
The child, George Peniston-Bird of Yarcombe, found the explosive while digging for bones. His mother initially didn’t believe him until he brought her a photo of the grenade taken on his iPad.
An ordnance disposal squad from the Royal Logistics Corps investigated the finding and confirmed that not only was the grenade from the 1940s, it was still live.
The bomb squad was able to safely detonate the grenade in a nearby field. Luckily, no members of the Peniston-Bird family were injured by the explosive.