Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN — A person contacted Youngstown police Saturday afternoon to report that a friend had found a gun in the area of Jacobs and Liberty Roads at the McKelvey Lake bridge on the city’s East Side.

When an officer arrived, he spoke with two people. One said he called Youngstown police because his friend found a gun in the lake while “magnet fishing,” which is when a person attaches a magnet to a rope to retrieve metallic objects from a body of water.

The second person said he threw a magnet over the bridge about 2 p.m. and pulled out a gun. He said he comes to the lake “every so often and that this isn’t the first time he’s pulled a weapon out of the lake.”

He pulled out his phone and showed the officer “many of the items that he found in the lake, which include a rifle, another handgun and even a knife,” the report states.

The gun was a Smith & Wesson SW9VE, the report states. Before the officer obtained the gun, its “slide was racked, and there was a bullet laying next to the gun,” the report states.

The officer checked to see if any bullets were left in the chamber, and there were not. Then the officer recovered the gun, along with the bullet, from the bridge’s sidewalk and later placed it into the evidence locker at the police station, the report states.