The man in the wheelchair did not look like he needed a loan for 17,000 reais ($3,250).
At a bank in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday, a woman wheeled in the body of a 68-year-old man who police later said had been dead for hours. The man was pale, and his head dropped back into an unsettling angle when it wasn’t being supported by Érika de Souza Vieira Nunes, the woman identified by Reuters as pushing the wheelchair and trying to crimp his limp hand around a pen.
“Uncle Paulo, can you hear me? You need to sign it. If you don’t sign, there is no way,” Nunes said to him as she stood at the bank counter, in video verified by NBC News.
“I cannot sign for you,” Nunes said. “This is a document. Here is your name, Paulo Roberto Braga. You must hold the pen.”
A bank clerk could be heard off camera telling Nunes, “I don’t think he is OK. He is not well.”
Nunes repeatedly lifted his head upright, but it would immediately drop backward. His eyes remained shut and his arms limp. When she curled the man’s fingers around a pen, his hand would not grip.
She assured the clerks, “He is normally like this.”
In an apparent effort to convince the bank staff, Nunes asked them if they saw him hold the door open.
An unnamed clerk said, “No, we did not see it.”
As she continued to attempt to have the man sign the document, bank staff became increasingly alarmed. “No, he is not well,” one of the clerks repeated. “His color look …”
“If you are not well, I will take you to the hospital. Do you want to go to the emergency room again?” Nunes asked the dead man.
Staff eventually called the police, who arrested Nunes and charged her with fraud. The corpse was taken to the morgue.
Police say investigations are underway to determine if the man, whose identity has not been confirmed as Paulo Roberto Braga, died from natural causes or “another means that would warrant a homicide investigation.”
Ambulance services indicated he had been dead for at least two hours, Fabio Souza, the police inspector in charge of the case, told the Brazilian TV Globo on Wednesday.
Nunes’ lawyer later argued that the man died at the bank, but a police forensic analysis determined he had died earlier, while lying down.