Victoria and Oak Bay Police Departments have received reports of hazardous products hidden in Halloween candies this year. The product found? Assorted arms and explosives.
As Nancy Drake, a worker at a 911 call centre, explained, this year’s Halloween weekend was a strange one for her co-workers and for response teams in the Greater Victoria Area.
“Well, the first call came in just around 6 p.m. After that, we just received more every hour,” said Drake in a statement released yesterday afternoon. “A parent called in saying that had found a live landmine in his child’s Mars Bar. I thought it was a prank call, but he started to yell at me, so I had an officer stop by. It seems I was right to do so. Albeit for reasons that I wasn’t expecting.”
Luckily for that family and their neighbours, the bomb squad from the Victoria Police department was able to dispose of the landmine safely within two hours of the call being placed. But that call ended up being a warning of the night to come for other law enforcement agents and emergency personnel.
“Some jerk had given me a Granny Smith apple when I went to his door,” said Ellen Drevais, 19, who some would argue is too old to be trick-or-treating anyway.
“When I got home I was sorting everything on the table and I set it to the side. I was prepping my lunch in the morning when I went to cut it open, and someone had stuffed something through a hole in the bottom — two hunting rifles! God knows what would have happened if it had been dark and I just bit into it!”
Unregistered and unmarked, those rifles are being examined by experts brought in from the Vancouver Police Department, who themselves had received hundreds of reports of munitions hidden inside different types of apples like Red Delicious, Crispin, Golden Delicious, Gala, Macoun, Honeycrisp, Granny Smith, Braeburn, Fuji, Cripps Pink, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Jonagold, Ginger Gold, Ambrosia, Paula Red, McIntosh, Empire, Winesap, Jazz, Cortland, Cameo, and, of course, York.
“They always say to check your kid’s bag of candy, so I did. I wasn’t expecting anything, but I noticed that a miniature Kit Kat had a cut on the side of its wrapper. I thought it might have been some sort of packaging error, but I opened it up and found this,” said Gerrard Béliveau, a resident of James Bay, gesturing to a four-foot-long green metal tube leaning against the wall of an evidence locker.
“That’s a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. If my kid had bitten into that . . . ” Béliveau rocked his head back and forth solemnly. “I couldn’t tell you what would have happened. I swear — people these days.”
