Woman arrested for taking corpse to bank to sign documents

A woman brought a 68-year-old man in a wheelchair into a bank branch and tried to get him to sign for a loan, but he had been dead for hours, Brazilian police said on Wednesday.

Erika Vieira Nunes wheeled the cadaver into the bank in a Rio suburb on Tuesday and told the teller the man wanted a loan for 17,000 reais ($3,250), security camera video showed.

She held a pen and moved his hand forward, but there was no response.

“Uncle, are you listening? You need to sign,” she said, according to the security video, suggesting she sign for him.

“He doesn’t say anything, that’s just how he is,” she said, adding, “If you’re not okay, I’m going to take you to the hospital.”

Bank staff became suspicious as the man’s head kept falling back when the woman stopped holding it and they called the police, who arrested her on the spot on fraud charges. The corpse was taken to the morgue.

Her lawyer argued that the man died at the bank but a police forensic analysis determined he had died earlier while lying down.

While police could not exactly provide the moment that Braga died, cadaver spots that were visible on the back of his head indicate that he would have been dead for about two hours.

Had Roberto died while he was sitting in the wheelchair, the cadaver patches would have been located on his legs, authorities said.

That comes as new footage has been unearthed showing Erika pushing around the corpse in the mall before wheeling it into the bank.