A New Mexico supermarket worker was shocked when he found a loaded gun in a package of frozen meat.
A worker at Alberstons in Roswell, N.M. wasn't expecting anything out of the normal when he was unwrapping meat that was shipped in from a packing plant in Colorado. However upon doing the routine task, he found a gun with seven rounds of ammunition in a package of ribs on Wednesday, according to NBC.
"The big cases of meat come in a box," Sabrina Morales, Roswell Police Department public relations liaison, said, according to NBC. "When he opened it, he saw the firearm. It wasn't packaged inside with the meat, but it was in the same box."
Upon finding the Rock Island Armory .38 super semi auto handgun in the meat box, the worker brought it to the Roswell Police Department.
Police are not sure where the gun could have come from. They entered the weapon into the National Crime Information Center database but they couldn't find any information about it being stolen or missing.
Since the weapon was in a box of meat that may have been bloody or had an odor, the supermarket worker cleaned it before giving it to the police. Due to this, they weren't able to find fingerprints on the weapon.
The other bizarre aspect is that the meat that was sent from the Swift Packing Plant in Greeley, Colo., was more than a year old.
"The other part that's disturbing is the date on the package was 6.8.2011. I don't know how long meat stays well-frozen, but that was the date of the package he was opening," Morales told NBC.
The packing plant has not made any comments about the issue as of yet but the Greeley police are aware of it and have all of the information that is available at this time.
Roswell police are continuing to examine the NCIC database and will do a search through the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in hopes of finding out more information.
"If it was stolen, we would have thought that by now it would have been entered into the actual database, NCIC, as a stolen firearm," Sgt. Jim Preston said. "But we don't have any of that information, and it is something we're looking into."
This strange find is certainly a rare one for the Roswell police department.
"You hear of people finding frogs in their salad or weird stuff like that, but never heard of this one," Morales said.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
