A 10-year-old Michigan boy lost two fingers and suffered a minor head injury after finding an explosive in a box of Christmas ornaments.
Brittany Moist said her son, Connor, was visiting his great-grandparents near Dewitt on Friday when he found the container of holiday decorations, which had been purchased from a yard sale last year, WLNS reported.
One of the ornaments — a silver one attached to a circular wire — caught his eye because it looked like a smoke bomb, she said.
“It had a hook on it like all the other ornaments and it had a little wick on it and he thought it was a smoke bomb, so he took it downstairs,” the mother told the station.
Connor’s godmother, Shanda Storie, who was there at the time and saw Connor with the silver device, said she tried to stop the boy from lighting it.
“I said, ‘Wait, Connor,’ and as I was walking toward him to grab it from him, he got excited and he lit it,” Storie said.
That’s when the device exploded — mangling the index and middle finger on the child’s left hand and leaving him with burns, hearing loss, and requiring five stitches on his forehead.
The boy was taken to a hospital, where doctors performed emergency surgery and had to remove the two fingers, his mother said.
“They rushed him down to like, do the X-rays and then straight to emergency surgery and then I met him in his room and he was already bandaged up, he was really scared,” Moist told WLNS.
Connor will undergo physical therapy and counseling.
“He’s been waking up at night afraid because he remembers what happened. If he hears a loud noise, he panics. He’s not dealing with the explosion very well,” Moist said.