Police make cannonball run with kids’ find

Old ordnance was plaything before wary dad seized it
The State
Mar. 21, 2006

John Chiles took one look at the “toy” his 7-year-old son, Ian, was playing with in their yard and knew it was a blast from the past.

“I suspected it was a cannonball,” the Columbia man said.

Figuring it was “probably a dud” from the Civil War era, he stuck it in a closet.

Now, his actions make him cringe. The melon-sized cannonball, which still contained black powder, was detonated by law enforcement authorities Monday at the landfill on Monticello Road.

“It’s blowing my mind,” John Chiles said.

Between 20 and 25 of the Chiles’ neighbors were evacuated from their homes at Colony Apartments on Bailey Street for nearly three hours Monday afternoon after Chiles called law enforcement officials.

But Monday afternoon, Ian, a first-grader at Watkins-Nance Elementary School, was still searching for the cannonball. Ian looked up at his father for an answer.

“The bomb squad came and got it,” he told Ian, who skateboarded around the living room.

“Can I be on the bomb squad?” Ian asked.

While John Chiles and his wife, Aretha, tried to steer their son down another career path, Ian recalled how the cannonball landed in his hands.

Ian said he and his friend, “not a girlfriend,” Dominique Evins, 6, were playing last week outside their apartments.

“She picked up the ball and called my name,” Ian said.

He took it and began rolling it and tossing it — until his father saw him.

“I took it away from him,” Chiles said.

Ian’s father put the cannonball in the family’s closet, covered it with blankets and called the State Museum to see what he should do with it. Several days later, a museum employee referred him to Fort Jackson officials, who suggested he call law enforcement.

That’s when Chiles gently removed the cannonball and placed it in a field at the apartment complex.

Officials who took the device to the landfill attached explosives and a blasting cap to it to make it explode, Richland County sheriff’s Capt. Joseph Pellicci said.

“It wasn’t a big boom,” he said.

Columbia police Sgt. Florence McCants said she could not remember the last time police worked a similar case.

No one knows how the cannonball got there or how long it had been there. It was not rusty and appeared to have been handled by others, John Chiles said.

“It was in real good shape.”

In a way, the news that the device was a cannonball was a relief to residents like Antuan Lewis, who hightailed it to his grandmother’s North Main Street home during the evacuation.

“I’m glad it ain’t no bomb.”