A California teen had to have the tips of several fingers amputated after he tried to fix a Geek Bar Pulse vape by banging it on the ground, causing it to explode in his hand.
Aiden Dean Adams, 15, was with friends when he banged the vape on the ground after it stopped working. As he brought it to his mouth, the device exploded, sending shrapnel into his face, searing some of his fingers to the bone and burning his chest, the Daily Mail reported.
Adams hitched a ride to his home by holding out his mutilated hand to passing vehicles, one of which stopped. His parents immediately called an ambulance when he arrived with the stranger.
"There was a lot of soft tissue damage. Digits were hanging. A lot of tissue exposure you could see bone, fingers, hand, ligaments," Adams' father, Robert, told the Daily Mail. "His whole inside left hand was completely exposed. It did almost completely sever his thumb. The very base of the thumb all the way down to where it meets the wrist. That was all hanging off."
Doctors were able to reattach Adams' thumb but the tips of his middle and index fingers had to be amputated. He will also be out of school until further notice while he recovers.
The teen's parents tried to warn him about the dangers of vaping but said he didn't listen, and they are angry at the industry for targeting kids and teens.
"This stuff popped up out of nowhere. I don't remember it ever being advertised to people other than seeing kids with it," Robert told the Daily Mail. "That's who you see more than anybody are the children. I never trusted these things. I don't like them."
"But we've put a device out there that can get into the hands of kids that apparently has a highly explosive possibility. That right there, people need to know about and be educated on. If they were, these things probably wouldn't be here," he added.
