Sorry Mech, the article says "Chevilott secured the gun, waiting for police to drive by so he could hand it over to them.
But, according to the station, the Detroit police never did pass by, so Chevilott finished his work that day, drove the gun home and later that same evening turned it into his local police department."
As quoted from an artlce found at the following link http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/05/15/detroit-groundskeeper-fired-after-finding-loaded-gun-handing-it-to-cops/?test=latestnews#ixzz1v2d8IUmc
And that was probably his biggest mistake...not just leaving it lie, standing over it, and calling the cops. Granted, I don't think anything he did justified termination, but his choice of actions left him a target for the idiots he works for....
This is what's making me suspect he might have been dithering about just keeping it, and it's just not a sufficiently established "fact" that it can be reported, but the parties concerned, him, the rest of the crew with him, his supervisor, and whoever it was above his supervisor "know" that's probably the case. Then he "turned it in" to cover himself when he decided he wasn't likely to get away with it.
Either that, even if his intentions were pure, how he went about this is just a symptom of his overall goofiness and incompetence, and they'd been looking for an excuse to terminate him for awhile now.
Maybe I'm over-estimating average human intelligence, but don't most folks know things like where the gun was found and stuff like possible fingerprints might be important to police?
And wouldn't a municipal grounds crew JUMP at any chance to just "stand around waiting" if they called the police, and "watched the gun" rather than continuing with their work?
IMO, if there's no follow-up story to say he's suing, or was reinstated, it's an indicator there probably was some sort of bad intent, or at least gross incompetence involved, and they won't run that or air it because "fired for (good) cause" isn't interesting enough.
