VENTURA : Mortar Shell Causes Stir in Downtown Lot

Robert Fletcher was walking through a grocery store parking lot in Ventura on Wednesday morning when he spotted what looked like a mortar shell.

It was a mortar shell: an 81-millimeter, standard military-issue shell lying outside the Vons supermarket on Ventura’s West Main Street, Ventura police said.

Police and bomb specialists were summoned to retrieve the shell, but not before Fletcher carried it in his car and into a restaurant a few blocks away.

Police were trying to determine late Wednesday if the shell was live. “We don’t make it a practice of taking them apart,” said Sgt. Rod Thompson of the Ventura County Sheriff Department’s bomb squad.

Fletcher, 26, of Camarillo, picked up the shell, put it in his car and took it with him to the nearest pay phone at a restaurant on California Street.

“A guy walked in, looked around and went over to the phone, holding the mortar,” recalled manager Shona Nicholson, who said she assumed it was a relic he had bought at a thrift store.

Police were a bit more alarmed. They instructed Fletcher to take the mortar shell out to the parking lot and wait for the bomb squad to arrive.

Bomb experts carefully loaded the shell into a trailer equipped to withstand a dynamite blast and stored it in a bunker in Camarillo until military specialists can retrieve it.

The shell found Wednesday was typical of those used since the Korean War, Thompson said. He added that military hardware occasionally turns up in the community because veterans have brought home war souvenirs.

However, he advises against picking them up.

“We use these incidents to say ‘Thank you, but next time you see something like this, don’t touch,’ ” Thompson said.