A Florida man who decided to take his 11-year-old grandson magnet fishing got more than he bargained for when the pair pulled up a pair of sniper rifles. Duane Smith and young Allen Cadwalader expected to reel in nothing more than some scrap metal during their fishing trip in Homestead, in Miami, on January 30. Turns out, they found a bit more.
- Smith was shocked by the weapons. As he told CNN, he and his grandson reeled in two sniper rifle receivers as well as bold carrier groups, both of which were wrapped in shrink wrap. What were they doing in the water?
- It was the first time they’d gone magnet fishing. Smith said he chose a bridge with a canal that happened to be near an aera where he usually goes hiking. He’d become interested in magnet fishing after watching some YouTube videos and thought it would be fun for his grandson, who has autism.
- Magnet fishing always carries the chance of bringing up something fun. “With magnet fishing every time I cast out or every other time I’m coming up with something,” Smith said. “There’s a bottle cap or you know, $7,000 sniper rifle.” He added that while finding rifles is pretty rare, he knows you can come up with anything, which is what he loves about it. “It’s kind of like a gambling addiction where you don’t know what the next pull of the slot machine is gonna be. A lot cheaper than playing slots,” he explained.
- The rifles were incredibly heavy. Smith, who’s a retired infantry soldier who knows all about sniper weapons, said that he believed the weapons to be military-grade and said they weighed about 20 pounds each. He did some research and discovered that they’re worth about $20,000. Given the condition they were found in, Smith thought they could have been there for a year or more.
- Smith and his grandson turned the weapons over to police. They did take them home to clean them up and found that the serial numbers had been ground off. At that point, they turned them over to Miami-Dade Police to be sent to a forensics lab for processing. This is necessary to determine if they’d ever been used in a crime.
