A rookie Los Angeles County fire paramedic reported on a bizarre accident recently on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. According to Colt Lewis, a driver of a pickup was texting while driving and struck a metal light pole, shearing it off. When the pole came down, it cut off the foot of a woman standing nearby. Here's part of the report-
Colt thought he heard the woman utter a faint moan. As he secured the head brace and straps across her body and prepared her for transport across the beach, he looked at her bloodied leg again. “Where’s the foot?” he shouted. “Does someone have her foot?” She still wore one delicate leather sandal.
“We can’t find the sucker,” one of the deputies told Colt.
“Can’t find it? How’s that possible?” Colt said. The girl needed her foot. They had to ice it down before the tissue started to die. It might be reattached. “It has to be here somewhere.” He went over to the damaged pickup.
The driver of the truck sat with his head down, behind the metal screen in the back seat of a black and white. A sheriff’s deputy stood outside, questioning him through the window and writing on his notepad. Colt interrupted. “Where’s the foot?” He was met with a shrug and a blank stare from the deputy. Colt looked at the driver of the pickup, a man about his own age, and hated him.
Colt walked around the pickup. Glass shards from a headlight and pieces of plastic lay on the ground. He knelt in a pool of green coolant dripping from the smashed radiator and looked under the front of the truck. The foot wasn’t there. He stood up and looked around. Thirty or forty people stood in the parking lot watching the activity.
Colt grabbed the arm of the deputy who was questioning the driver. “Help me out. We have to find her foot.” The crowd backed away as Colt and the deputy walked a circle around the truck and the cement base of the pole, scanning the ground. Colt shouted to the crowd, “We have to locate this girl’s foot. Has anyone seen it?” A few heads shook as a buzz went through the crowd: a foot was missing. A severed human foot was somewhere in the parking lot.
Colt scanned the crowd of spectators, hoping for a response. He noticed a short man holding a take-home food bag, wearing a black hat, dark sunglasses, tight black pants and a long sleeve black shirt, buttoned at the neck and wrists. Standing among the people wearing shorts, swimsuits and T-shirts on a beautiful hot day at the beach, the guy looked like someone from a Goth horror movie.
Would you believe the guy in black picked up the foot and took it home? Would you believe that the rookie paramedic was determined to retrieve the foot? During his search, he discovered a dark underside of Los Angeles full of tattooed women, Goth fetishists, and body parts dealers.