James Glencoe was 17 years old and living in Moses Lake, Washington, when a pipe bomb he built with his own hands tore one of them off.
It didn’t start there. It started with dry ice, like someone trying a homemade chemistry trick. Then came black powder. Each experiment a little bigger, a little more unstable, until the final mixture exploded inside his parents’ house.
Author Michael Yon, who investigated these cases for his book The Bomb Boys, says that teenagers who secretly make explosives are far more common than any parent imagines, and that they almost always brag about their experiments before something goes wrong. James survived, learned to live without his hand, and even appeared signing thank-you cards weeks after leaving the hospital. But his story remained as a clinical warning of how quickly a hobby escalates into disaster.
