'What are the odds of that?' B.C. teen finds war medals while fishing

At first, Taro Milligan thought he had reeled in a piece of trash.

The little black box covered in duct tape got hooked on his line about two feet from the bank as he was reeling it in.

"I was curious, so I opened it up, and there's a bunch of World War I and II memorabilia," Milligan told CTV News via Zoom on Thursday.

The Grade 11 student at Abbotsford's Robert Bateman Secondary School said he started "freaking out" when he realized what he had picked up.

Milligan said his English teacher recently shared an anecdote with the class about war veterans throwing their medals off of bridges because they don't want to be reminded of past trauma. Now, here he was, fishing with a friend off of Vye Road on a long weekend and possibly looking at the result of just such a story.

"Wow, that just came to reality, like, real fast," he said, explaining what went through his head when he realized what he had found.

"I'm underneath a bridge right now, and there's World War I and II medals right in front of me. That's crazy. What are the odds of that?"

He showed the find to his teachers first, then to the local newspaper, and soon to other media outlets, including CTV News.

While he's heard plenty of interest in the story, he said he hasn't received any tips yet about who might have lost the items.

Milligan said he doesn't actually think the medals were deliberately discarded. The way they were packaged makes him think they were being stored in a garage or a basement, and may have been swept away or stolen during the November 2021 floods.

"I want to find who owns these medals so I can get them back to their family, because I don't think it's right for me to sell them or give them away or keep them myself, anyways," he said. "Nor do I think it's right to put them back where I found them."