Take a dead man to the bank and try to get the corpse to sign for a loan of 3000 euros. It is the surreal story in Brazil involving a woman, Erika de Souza Vieira, arrested in Rio de Janeiro. The woman showed up at a bank in the Bangu area with a man sitting in a wheelchair. She told the employees that it was her uncle: the man was supposed to sign documents to authorize a loan in favor of his so-called niece. To everyone, however, the situation appeared anomalous. The man, identified as 68-year-old Paulo Roberto Braga, had been dead for a few hours, as was later discovered. The woman tried to deceive the institute’s employees with an unbelievable ‘act’: holding her uncle’s head, she repeatedly ‘invited’ him to sign the documents. “I don’t think he feels well, he doesn’t look good at all,” said one of the employees. “It’s always like this,” Erika de Souza Vieira said. “Do you want me to take you back to the hospital?”, she asked the elderly man without, obviously, receiving an answer.
The call to the police was inevitable, who intervened and arrested the woman. “She knew he was dead. He had been dead for at least two hours,” one of the investigators, Fabio Luiz Souza, told the Bom Dia Rio broadcast. “In 22 years in the police force I have never seen a story like this.”
Ana Carla de Souza Correa, the woman’s lawyer, proposed another version: “The facts did not happen as they were told. Paulo was alive when he arrived at the bank. Everything will be clarified, we believe in Erika’s innocence.”
