LANSING — A magnet fisherman pulled an inert mortar shell from the Grand River this past week just down Michigan Avenue from the Capitol, according video posted on a Lansing Reddit page.
“I went out magnet fishing at this bridge I typically have a ton of luck at, usually finding guns or historical items (1912 & 1913 license plates, old toy cars, skeleton keys, porcelain signs, etc.), definitely wasn’t expecting a mortar… Not sure if it was live or not, so we called the state bomb squad,” the poster XanDuLowMagnetizer said online.
The video posted on Tuesday shows a man and Michigan State Police bomb squad officers on the north side of the Michigan Avenue bridge over the Grand River.
“(The) MSP Bomb Squad did respond to that area and retrieved a piece of ordinance from a magnet fisherman. The ordinance was inert (not live) and was disposed of accordingly,” said Michigan State Police First District Detective Sgt. Isaac Mills.
There was no indication of how the mortar shell came to be in the river or how long it had been there.
In the video, the magnet fisherman can be heard saying he dragged up “another muffler,” but once the item is in the man’s hands, a second person says it looks like a piece of ordnance.
The video clip then switches to the man speaking on a cellphone and telling someone the item looks like an 80- or 82-millimeter mortar and that he thought it was an exhaust muffler from a motorcycle.
The video then shows an MSP bomb squad truck arriving and officers approaching the item.
The 39-second video ends with officers moving the item to their vehicle.
“Definitely tired of finding UXCOs though,” the post notes. In a comment on the post, the person says the bomb squad blew up the item.
