Plastic containers, soda cans, plastic bags–those are the kinds of items any volunteer would expect to find in cleaning up the Mill River Park between downtown and the West Side.
But a semi-automatic handgun also showed up in the mud of Mill River, which a volunteer spotted on Monday and handed over to a city employee. The employee, in turn, handed it over to police shortly after noon.
The volunteer found the gun in the river mud near the intersection of Richmond Hill and Greenwich avenues (see map attached to this article), about half a block north of Interstate 95.
The gun—so rusty and mud-clogged that its identification number couldn't be immediately read—will be examined by police to see if it can be identified, said Sgt. William Hinatuk, a department spokesman.
The mud and rust indicate that the gun wasn't just recently thrown into the river, according to police.
