The video shows a woman leaning over the casket of Lois Hicks, wriggling a wedding ring off the deceased woman’s finger. Then, with no one else in the room, she turns away from the casket and casually walks away.
While the woman may have known that stealing the ring was a crime, she probably didn’t know this: The ring she took was a fake, a $10 piece of plastic, according to police.
Authorities in Odessa, Texas, continued Monday to search for the thief who stole a ring from the body of the 88-year-old Hicks, who died Thursday.
“I can’t believe someone would be that low,” Vel McKee, Hicks’ daughter, told the Odessa American.
The theft occurred Friday, less than a day after Hicks’ death, when a woman walked into Sunset Funeral Home in Odessa around 5:30 p.m. and asked to use the restroom, funeral home manager Bill Vallie said.
McKee and others close to Hicks had left the funeral home shortly before the thief’s arrival, she told the American. McKee said she returned 15 minutes later to touch up the deceased woman’s makeup when she noticed the the ring was missing from the finger, the skin of which had torn during the removal.
The theft occurred over the course of about three minutes, police said, before the suspect fled in a four-door Saturn. “It makes me sick to my stomach,” she told the American. “Horrible. I hope they catch her.”
Cpl. Steve LeSueur of the Odessa Police Department said the crime is considered a felony. “It’s being investigated, even though the ring was a $10 plastic ring,” LeSueur told USA TODAY. “Theft of a corpse, regardless of whether it’s $5 or $5,000 is still an automatic felony.”
It’s not clear how the video of the theft ended up online, where it’s amassed tens of thousands of views across , police said. A representative of Sunset Funeral Home told USA TODAY that the business did not publish the video online and declined further comment. LeSueur told USA TODAY that police saw the video online late Friday night, nearly 24 hours before the theft was reported Saturday evening.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...stealing-ring-womans-casketbut-fake/82902536/
Those Obama voters have no shame....
