What was supposed to be an innocent surprise from a toy vending machine turned into a horrifying experience when it dispensed a ring embossed with a Nazi symbol.
Leona Kelley said she gave her son 25 cents, like she's always done, to put into the plastic toy machine outside a Family Dollar store in Tulsa, Okla., on Wednesday, KOKI-TV reported.
But this time around one of the plastic goodies turned out to be a gold-colored ring with the infamous Nazi insignia on the front.
"You don't want to know what my reaction was," Kelley, of Tulsa, told the station. "I just started yelling at the store people like 'what the hmmm is this!' I'm like 'why is this there?'"
Staff at the Family Dollar near East Pine Street told KOKI-TV that a vending company, not the store, controls what goes into the machines out front. An Oklahoma phone number was listed on the machine, but the name of the company was not there.
A man who answered the line did not provide a comment but said the toys in the machine will soon be examined and removed, the station reported.
Another trip to the Family Dollar revealed more than a dozen more rings with swastikas mixed with the other children's toys in the machine. Store employees said they had issues with the vendor before.
Kelley, who is thankful her son had no idea what the symbol meant, thinks there could have been a conspiracy to place the Holocaust-era rings in a mostly black neighborhood. She said she went to other Family Dollars around Tulsa and didn't find similar rings.
"It was made just like the other rings they've got in there," Kelley said. "You can bend it up and shove it in here. So it was made for a vending machine. I just don't understand why."
