Lake County Sheriff’s Officers responded to a call in the 25000 block of West 3rd Street, unincorporated Antioch, of a suspected munition. A homeowner was doing yard work and noticed a metal object sticking out of the ground. She used a shovel and unearthed the item which appeared to be a rocket, then contacted the police.
Sheriff’s Deputies identified the object as a live World War II-era anti-tank rocket and evacuated the area.
The Waukegan Bomb Squad arrived on the scene, took the rocket to a safe location and detonated it.
According to reports, the homeowner conducting the digging is Lauren Intzekiotis who said, “I was just playing with my boys, and I saw this weird metal thing sticking out of the ground, grabbed my shovel and started digging it up and pulled it out of the ground with ease and took some photos of it and showed my neighbor, showed my dad, and my dad’s like ‘hey, you should call the police and figure out what’s going on with that.”
She had no idea how long the rocket which showed visible signs of corrosion had been there. The homes were constructed in the 1960s and prior to that, the area was farmland.