When North Carolina newspaper deliveryman picked up a teddy bear off the road, he never expected it to be a bomb. But, as he was later told by authorities and a bomb squad, that's exactly what it was.
Fox News reports that Anthony Cannon found the toy while running his route Thursday near Lattimore.
"I thought it was real unusual to be sitting in the middle of the road," the 42-year-old employee of The Shelby Star said. "It was pitch-black out there. When I picked the bear up some sort of container fell out."
Cannon then took the bear and the cylindrical container to his cousin's home to examine them. When he noticed that the bottle was filled with liquid and had wires coming out of it, he immediately called 911.
A bomb squad from Gastonia responded to his call. "Within about two minutes of walking up, they said it was an IED and cleared us out of the house," Cannon said.
The bomb was then deactivated and taken to a lab for investigation.
Cleveland County Sheriff Alan Norman stated that Cannon was lucky the bomb wasn't activated in his possession. "It could have caused personal injury had the device activated," Norman said.
Cannon was just glad he was the one who found the teddy bear, and not a child. "If a kid had walked down the road and seen that bear, I'm pretty sure they would have picked it up," he said.
Neighbors in the area shared Cannon's concern. “I’m just trying to figure out why you would put a bomb in a teddy bear in the first place. If anybody would have picked it up it would have been a child,” Cannon’s neighbor Jessica Burge told ABC News.
Image: YouTube screen shot
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