Early morning fireworks cause concern in Napanee and surrounding area

A baffling barrage of fireworks in the early morning hours of Monday, Jan. 10, 2022, has mystified and angered residents of Napanee, Deseronto, and Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory.

Kimberly Ramelan posted a photo to Facebook showing the large cylinder of fireworks found just outside her door on Palace Road Monday morning.

At about 1:40 a.m., Ramelan said, she woke to a terrible banging noise outside. “We heard these loud booms and my mom is from Northern Ireland… she grew up in The Troubles, so she thought it was gunshots. My dog started barking and growling, and then he went into a full-blown panic attack. I ran upstairs and my dad said that they’d seen lights. I didn’t see the light because I was downstairs, but it was scary. We didn’t know what it was.”

Ramelan, who was in the basement at the time, said that her parents’ window faces the back of the home toward the river, but that the firework casings were found on the front yard.

Ramelan saw a Facebook post on the group ‘What’s Going On Napanee,’ where someone was inquiring about what the loud noise in the early morning had been. She responded by posting a photo of the spent firework casing and detailing what had happened. This was when things got even stranger – multiple people had the same experience early Monday morning at just about the same time in various parts of Napanee, Deseronto and Tyendinaga.

Melanie Goulding, who lives on Dundas street in Napanee, also called the police. “My husband and I were sleeping and around 1:44 a.m., we heard a lot of popping noises,” she said. “So, we jumped out of bed to see what was going on and found out someone had let off fireworks and they had them pointed right at my house and I called the cops.”

The Lennox and Addington Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) detachment told her she wasn’t the only one. “They had a bunch of reports of it happening,” she shared.

Goulding said it was a scary incident, noting that, “the thing that I was most worried about was my children.”

Though she couldn’t be reached for comment, Linda Tudor of Deseronto commented on the Facebook post that there had been a similar incident at their home on Arena Street at nearly the same time. “Oh my goodness, we had someone fire one at [our] window at 1:30 this morning and found a box of 35 spent fireworks in our yard, thought something was exploding. Pretty scary stuff,” she wrote.

Tudor went on to say that her family member found the box of 35 fireworks on the sidewalk outside and that they had been “aimed at the bedroom window, left black all over the frame.”

Even more individuals from other parts of Napanee, Deseronto, and Tyendinaga shared similar statements on the post.

Constable Shannon Cork of the Lennox and Addington Detachment of the OPP confirmed that there had been multiple calls about fireworks in the wee hours of Monday morning, noting, “We haven’t got a suspect or made an arrest, but we urge anyone who had a similar incident to contact us as soon as possible.”

The Lennox and Addington OPP can be reached at (613) 354-3369.