Federal Court Awards $160,000 to Boy Whose Hand Was Torn by Unexploded Navy Practice Bomb

On February 19, 1967, a seven-year-old boy was playing with his cousin at a home in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, when a Navy practice bomb he was holding exploded in his left hand. The bomb was one of the pyrotechnic devices that Navy pilots had dropped on the Naval Practice Bombing Range at Duck, on the Outer Banks, where the government had trained pilots from 1943 until about 1965. Judge Kellam of the Eastern District of North Carolina found the United States liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act and, in an opinion dated February 9, 1970, awarded the boy $160,000. His father was awarded $1,700.30 for the medical expenses already incurred.

The court's findings put the blame on how the Navy handled the range after it stopped using it. Bombs that failed to detonate were known to be scattered across unfenced sand dunes that were a popular place to hunt for Indian relics. Except while bombing practice was under way, nobody was kept off the range, and witnesses testified that Navy personnel sometimes looked over bombs that visitors picked up and let them carry them away. Small bombs like this one turned up on lawns and in homes nearby as souvenirs. The Navy had recognized the danger by 1966 and discussed cleaning up the area, but the bombs were never buried and many remained. The few warning signs that existed were small and in disrepair. The court called the negligence plain, noting that the law requires the highest degree of care with explosives, especially where children are concerned.

The boy had picked up the bomb in January 1967 during a trip to the dunes with his uncle and a young cousin, and the uncle let each child take one home. Weeks later the boy noticed a shiny piece of metal in his bomb, tried to pry it open, and struck it against concrete. The blast severed the index, middle and fourth fingers of his left hand, which was his dominant hand, and damaged the little finger, the palm and the back of the hand. Surgeons grafted skin from his abdomen onto the hand. He spent weeks in the hospital after the accident, with his arm strapped to his abdomen while the graft took, and he returned for further hospital stays in April 1967 and a surgery in June 1968.

The attending physician put the permanent loss at 75 to 90 percent of the use of the hand, and said it was uncertain whether the remaining fingers would keep growing normally. The abdominal graft left a large scar that might need future surgery, and the boy had become more nervous. In setting damages the court looked at his age, the pain already endured, the 61.67 years of life he could expect, and the narrowing of the work and activities open to him.

The government had argued that the boy's parents and uncle caused the injury by letting him handle the bomb. The court found no evidence the parents knew he had it and none that the uncle was negligent, and held that the boy, just over seven and unaware of any danger, was not contributorily negligent. The government also pursued a third-party claim against the uncle, which the court left pending and asked the government to decide within thirty days whether to continue.

William E. O'Neill, Jr. of Ashcraft & Gerel in Washington, D.C. and John H. Hall, Jr. of Hall & Hall in Elizabeth City represented the plaintiffs. Under the Federal Tort Claims Act the court set their combined fee at 25 percent of the recoveries, paid out of the judgments.