Achi news desk-
A Brazilian woman has been arrested after she took a body into a bank, presumably hoping it would help her secure a loan.
Érika de Souza Vieira Nunes was caught on video by bank employees pushing the body of Paulo Roberta Braga into a Rio De Janeiro bank branch in a wheelchair.
In the video, Nunes is heard calling Braga her uncle as she talks to the body and pushes his head, according to The Independent.
“Uncle, are you listening? You need to sign [the contract]. If you don’t sign, there’s no way, because I can’t sign for you,” Nunes is heard saying in the film, before grabbing a pen and forcing it into the dead man’s hands.
“Sign so you don’t give me any more headaches, I can’t take it anymore,” he said to the corpse.
“I don’t think it’s good. It doesn’t look good at all,” one of the workers can be heard saying, according to The Guardian.
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Nunes is allegedly trying to use her deceased relative to help her secure a loan for a few thousand dollars. He had died a few hours earlier aged 68.
The bank staff were so concerned about Braga’s health that they called the police. When law enforcement showed up, they found that Nunes had brought a dead man to the bank.
Nuns are now facing charges of mutilation and attempted theft by deception, according to the Rio newspaper O Dia.
“She knew he was dead … he had been dead for at least two hours,” investigating officer Fábio Luiz Souza told the Bom Dia Rio breakfast news program on Wednesday.
“I’ve never come across a story like this in 22 years [as an officer],” Souza added.
Nunes’ lawyer says Braga was alive when he entered the bank.
“The facts did not happen as they were told. Paulo was alive when he arrived at the bank,” Ana Carla de Souza Correa told reporters.
“All this will be cleared up. We believe in Érika’s innocence.”
However, police forensic analysis determined that he had died earlier, while lying down.
The Weekend at Bernie’s-Style fraud is reminiscent of a similar fraud attempt back in 2022, when an Irish man held up a body and took it into a post office in an effort to claim the dead man’s pension money.
Declan Haughney told the Irish Times that the deceased man was an uncle, but claimed he did not know the man had died and thought he might have died on the walk to the post office.
& copy 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
