A man reportedly attempted to perpetrate insurance fraud by paying someone to cut off both of his legs and blame it on a tractor accident.
The 60-year-old man from the US is accused of committing this act in November of 2023.
According to the Howell County Sheriff’s Office, the individual stated that the accident resulted in the loss of both his legs. However, his version of events did not make sense.
His legs were missing, they literally could not be located, which was highly unusual given the circumstances of the ‘tragedy’.
The man’s wounds were also allegedly too clean to have been inflicted by the tractor. Furthermore, the individual was a recognised paraplegic, raising concerns about how he managed to get in the line of a tractor (named a brush hog).
“If it was done by a brush hog, it would have been a bloody, gory mess. I have seen those types of accidents before. This was not like that,” Torey Thompson, a lieutenant with the Howell County Sheriff’s Office, told the Springfield News Reader.
Police and medical workers dispatched to the scene of the accident were particularly intrigued about the bandages on his leg stumps and who had applied them shortly after the accident.
As the inquiry progressed and more inconsistencies developed in the injured man’s account of what happened, authorities are reportedly uncovered that an individual from Florida had come to the man with an axe and allegedly hacked off his legs for a price.
“It was a poorly executed plan. I have not seen anything quite like it,” Thompson was quoted as saying.
The alleged scammer man could not be technically prosecuted with insurance fraud.
The sheriff's office is said to have been fed up with the waste of time and money that it contemplated bringing charges for making a fraudulent police report.
IOL