The evening of Sept. 6 was unremarkable for Walter Mulso. He was at home, watching a movie with his family when the phone rang around 8 p.m.
A friend's refrigerator had gone on the fritz. Could Mulso help find a temporary replacement? Mulso remembered that his brother-in-law, Dennis Haberstich, happened to have an extra refrigerator.
Mulso went over to Haberstich's house. The men loaded the refrigerator onto a trailer.
And then they went around the side of a pole barn on Haberstich's property, overlooking a field where a friend of Haberstich had been firing a homemade potato cannon. Minutes later, the potato cannon malfunctioned, spewing shrapnel, and Haberstich was critically wounded. He died about an hour later at Kishwaukee Community Hospital, leaving a wife and two young children.
Mulso had been at the house for a total of 15 or 20 minutes; he was injured himself when he fell on farm equipment, running through the dark yard for help for Haberstich.
"It's just incredible ... you can what-if yourself forever. It's just a tragedy that happened. And it unfortunately took someone's life. Our focus right now is to be supportive and try to help out as much as we can," Mulso said.
Police say no laws were broken that night, when the metal potato cannon, fueled with gunpowder, essentially exploded.
The Internet is rife with videos and Web sites with instructions on making potato cannons – also called potato launchers or potato guns. They are typically made of PVC piping and fueled with hairspray or propane. It is not common, says one man who owns an online potato launcher business, for these devices to be made of metal and fueled with gunpowder.
"The fact is that they're not commercially made. They're homemade. There are so many things that could go wrong," said DeKalb County Sheriff Roger Scott.
Scott said his office contacted the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms to investigate possible legal questions about the gunpowder being used as a fuel for the cannon. Scott said ATF agents found nothing illegal with the way the gunpowder was purchased. And, Scott said, as far as his investigators can tell, there was nothing illegal about firing the potato cannon in the county.
"The state has so many laws against serious fireworks. In this case, it was a heavy-duty steel cannon, only a foot long, with a wide-mouth barrel. They flash and everything. They appear fun, but it's one of those dangerous things," Scott said. "As far as I can determine, there is nothing that appears to be illegal."
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Dennis Haberstich, who was 43, was a generous man, Mulso said, and he often let friends use his property for recreation, whether it was riding all-terrain vehicles or fishing. On Sept. 6, a friend from Chicago had brought a homemade potato cannon to Haberstich's property and was firing it toward an open field.
After Haberstich and Mulso loaded the refrigerator into Mulso's trailer, the two went around to a pole barn to watch the potato cannon firing.
The first time Mulso saw it fire, he heard a big boom. The second time, there was a "flash and a puff of smoke." The man operating the cannon bolted an extension onto the cannon barrel.
"It was quarter-inch round pipe steel – it looked like a miniature cannon to me. It was welded to a plate," Mulso said.
The man firing the cannon brought it a little closer to a pole barn where Haberstich and Mulso were standing. Mulso said he expected to see something akin to a giant sparkler.
Instead, "it was like a percussion bomb," he said. Neighbors told him later that the explosion rattled windows in houses down the street.
"It shook us. [Haberstich] was sitting next to me, and a piece of shrapnel hit him, and that was the end," Mulso said.
Mulso ran for help, falling and cutting his knee badly in the process. Later, he went back to the yard and found many pieces of shrapnel.
The cannon was "peeled like a banana," he said.
"I just want everybody to know that my brother-in-law didn't build this device, and he didn't set it off. It was a tragic accident," he said.
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The cannon that malfunctioned in the accident was "wide-mouthed," about a foot long, made of "heavy metal" and fueled with two types of gunpowder, Sheriff Scott said. Two bottles of gunpowder were found near the cannon. Both bottles were partially empty.
"They'd been using it quite a bit all day," Scott said.
Web sites for manufacturers of the two gunpowders indicate they are meant to be used for shotguns and muzzleloaders, respectively.
A metal construction is unusual for a potato launcher, said Jeremy Hanson, owner of SpudTech LLC, an Internet-based potato launcher business based in Minnesota. The Web site sells components and complete potato launchers, and Hanson offers tips for safety and construction on the Web site.
Most launchers are made of PVC piping and use propane or hairspray as fuel, he said. When a launcher is fueled with gunpowder, he said, "it's more like a real cannon."
"You could shove a potato down a shotgun barrel, but it wouldn't be a potato launcher," he said. "What they built was an actual cannon, and by using gunpowder, that's a big no-no."
Hanson explained that it is too easy to overpower a launcher with gunpowder. Hairspray, on the other hand, is a "lower power" and "appropriate" fuel, he said.
Hanson said potato launchers can be safe, but they must be built and fueled correctly.
But accounts of accidents with potato launchers are easy to find; Hanson said accidents often happen when someone looks down the barrel of a launcher or uses an inappropriate fuel.
Mulso said he didn't know much about potato launchers until two weeks ago. Now he's seen videos of them on YouTube and read about them on the Web. And, he said, he recently heard a story about some children in Genoa playing with a potato launcher.
"Hopefully they get the message and they hear this story," Mulso said. "Anything that explodes is unpredictable."