It sounds suspiciously like a scene from “Weekend at Bernie’s,” in which two salespeople, Richard and Larry, decide not to let the death of their boss get in the way of their fun. A woman in Brazil tried to use a dead man in a wheelchair to get a loan.
Security footage, first broadcast by TV Globo, Brazil’s largest broadcaster, shows Erika Vieira Nunes talking to the dead man, whom she called her “uncle,” and asking him to sign financial documents that would allow her to get a loan to block.
After Nunes drove the dead man to the bank in a Rio de Janeiro suburb on Tuesday and told the teller the man wanted a loan of 17,000 reais ($3,250), security cameras showed him holding her hand in his and she said that he had to grab the pen. hard so he could sign for the loan. As his head fell back, she put her hand behind his neck to steady it.
A suspicious bank employee asked why the man in the wheelchair looked so pale, and Nunes, who claimed to be both his niece and his caregiver, said he “just happened to be.” “Uncle, are you listening? You need to sign,” she said, according to the security video, saying she couldn’t sign for him. She also told him: “If you are not well, I will take you to the hospital,” Reuters reports.
Paramedics and the local police chief who arrived on the scene confirmed that the dead man, Paulo Roberto Braga, aged 68, had died a few hours earlier. “She tried to pretend she wanted him to sign the loan. He already entered the bank dead,” police chief Fábio Luiz told Brazilian TV Globo. “The most important thing is to continue the investigation to identify other family members and learn more about this loan.”
Luiz also said they will investigate the circumstances of Braga’s death and try to determine whether Nunes is actually his niece, and whether other family members were involved in the alleged bank fraud attempt, Rio newspaper O Dia reported.
Nunes could face charges of theft by fraud, embezzlement and abuse of a corpse.
The disturbing couch video went viral on Twitter in Brazil, with “cadáver,” the Portuguese word for corpse, being for a time the most popular term on the platform in the South American country, British news site The Telegraph reports.
