Imagine, you’re walking down the sidewalk in Nebraska, when you spot something on the ground. Is it a rock? A black sports ball? No, it’s a metal grenade!

A Lincoln resident made this shocking discovery early one Monday morning. They called 911. Police and Lincoln Fire & Rescue rolled up. Sirens blaring, the sidewalk blocked off. Bomb Squad Commander Tim Stohlmann confirmed the grenade was real but inert—no explosives inside.The Squad decided to send it to the military for proper disposal.

Police puzzled over what a grenade was doing on a sidewalk in America’s heartland. Then they got a phone call no one was expecting.

Alex Lattimore said his car had been broken into overnight. One item was missing. A grenade.

From garage wall to glove box, then gone

Turns out, the grenade had belonged to Lattimore’s grandfather, a Korean War veteran. The souvenir had hung in his garage for decades. Lattimore explained, “A couple years ago, my grandma passed away and we were cleaning out the garage, and it was one of those things that I looked and and I was like, ‘It’s something I kind of want.’”

Why did he ask for the grenade? “My grandpa was like my best friend, so all the things I have from him mean a lot to me. It’s unreplaceable…So I threw it in my glove box in my car.”

One Monday, Lattimore came out of his house and realized someone had jimmied open his car to search for valuables. But he wasn’t worried about his travel mug or phone charger. “The only thing in my car that I probably cared about at that moment was my grandfather’s hand grenade, so that’s when I realized it was gone.”

Lattimore wasn’t optimistic. “I called all the pawn shops yesterday morning and said I will pay you whatever they want for it, I just want it back.”

No pawn shops had seen the heirloom. Lattimore thought, “I don’t really know if I’m going to get my grenade back.” Then he called the police.

The grenade scare ends in relief

Police pieced the mystery together immediately and an officer paid Lattimore a visit. He remembered, “I told him the story.” Lattimore waited for a clue, but got something else. The grenade. “He just handed it to me.”

The young man learned one important lesson about grenade ownership. “I didn’t realize until after he’d handed me the grenade that the bomb squad and Fire & Rescue was out. The whole debacle. I also didn’t realize, like, oh I probably should have said something earlier. Like, ‘My grenade’s gone.'”

Lattimore learned a second important lesson, too. He promises he’ll be keeping his heirloom grenade safely inside his house from now on. See the latest coverage yourself in the video below: