A Washington man's truck was ruined by a massive explosion caused by an apparent tennis ball bomb, according to authorities.
A massive explosion rocked the tiny town of Roy in rural Washington, where authorities say a bomb was apparently stuffed inside a tennis ball that was lobbed onto a man's truck.
Resident Daniel Kingshott and his family were jolted out of their beds Saturday at about 3:30 a.m. by a very loud blast outside their home.
Kingshott said he went outside to investigate, and received texts from his neighbors asking what was going on.
“Got up, checked the house, made sure everything was, you know, safe in the house,” Kingshott told WISTV. “A couple of neighbors texted us to ask if we knew what it was, and nobody seemed to know what is was. And everybody was safe, and so everybody went back to bed.”
After daylight, Kinshott went back outside, and that's when he discovered his truck had been destroyed.
He called the Pierce County Sheriff's Office, which serves his small town of 800 people outside Tacoma.
"I wasn’t sure if something had fallen on it," from aircraft at a nearby military base, he told the station. "I wasn’t sure what was going on,” he said.
But the responding deputy noticed the smell of gunpowder and found bits of a tennis ball.
The Kingshotts' home "was so far off the roadway, that it seems like they almost were targeted on purpose," Sgt. Darren Moss Jr. told the station. "Normally we see that as some sort of dispute, but I was just talking to somebody else, and honestly, we do see some wild things out in the county sometimes,” he said.
Kingshott said he loves the rural area and won't leave.
“You know, I’m not going to run away from someone who’s going to do this to me,” he said. “What’s going to have to happen is, is I’m going to have to give myself the ability to defend myself from people like this," he said.
An investigation is ongoing.
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