It was on a recent Friday in Sin City when Las Vegas Metropolitan Police were called by casino security about a man who claimed to have a grenade in his ass. Brian Gower, 46, was allegedly threatening to blow up the STRAT Casino with said butt grenade.
This, however, wasn’t the first encounter the police had with Gower that day. Officers had approached him previously after they spotted him wandering around while visibly upset. At that time, Gower reportedly told the cops that “he was going to kill his ex-wife because he had been in prison because of her.” Apparently, the officers decided he wasn’t a serious threat and let him go.
Cut to a few hours later, when security at the STRAT Casino was allegedly confronted by Gower’s grenade-in-his-ass threat. When he stepped onto the property, they handcuffed him and walked him to the security office, where they promptly phoned police. While they waited for the officers to arrive, Gower allegedly told them that he was “Joe Rogan 2.0.” When the police questioned Gower, he told the responding officers that he “had a grenade in his ass and he wanted to fart,” according to arrest records.
He also reportedly explained that he was just an actor “trying to raise awareness of bomb attacks” before telling the cops that he knew Kim Jong-Un, the dictator-for-life of North Korea, and that he was represented by Saul Goodman, the fictional lawyer from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
Officers found no explosives on Gower, and subsequent X-rays confirmed that there was no grenade or other explosives lodged in his rectum. Gower was arrested, and has been charged with one count of making a terroristic threat.
While it may seem remarkable that a man would claim to have shoved a grenade in his ass, it wouldn’t be at all surprising to emergency room staff who are often confronted by foreign objects in butts. The sheer volume of things that are inserted and then get stuck in people’s rectums each year is intimidating on its own. But then you see the list of the actual objects themselves. In 2016, for example, doctors reported removing the following from their patients’ rectums: a screwdriver, a shot glass, a root beer bottle, a bowling pin, a salt shaker, a toilet bowl brush, a hammer, a broom handle, a baseball, a wine cork wrapped in paper towels and electrical tape. “The strangest object I’ve seen is a Barbie’s head,” Linda Girgis, a family practice doctor in New Jersey, told U.S. News & World Report.
The excuses for how those objects arrived in their resting place are equally epic. Case in point: There was the patient who claimed that they “slipped onto a cucumber in the shower,” and another who suggested that the light bulb lodged illuminating his asshole must have gotten in there while he was sleepwalking. On the flip side, it’s also suspected by some researchers that certain patients show up at the ER with a foreign object inserted in their body specifically because “they enjoy having the object removed by a health care worker.”
In other words, it may have literally been more explosive, but an ass grenade probably wouldn’t shock most ER staff. It’s a good bet they’ve had to defuse far crazier situations.
Zaron Burnett III
Zaron Burnett is an investigative journalist and longform features writer based in Los Angeles. He covers culture, politics, race, and other perplexing mysteries for MEL.
