A 45-year-old American who allegedly tried to thwart justice by orchestrating a whole set-up to blame the death of a thirty-year-old on a bear attack was caught even though the detectives would not have believed for a second in his story.
“Once detectives laid eyes on the body, the deceased’s injuries were not consistent with a bear attack or a fall. It was very easy to exclude,” Monroe County Sheriff Tommy J. Jones II said at a press conference when the body was discovered on October 18, according to NBC News.
That day, police received a call from a Tennessee man claiming his name was Brandon Andrade, who said he was injured after being chased by a bear and then falling off a cliff, according to the American media.
Except that upon arriving near the Charles Hall Bridge in Tellico Plains, officers reportedly located the body of a thirty-year-old man who was carrying the identification of Brandon Kristopher Andrade, but who had nothing to do with that name, which had already been stolen several times according to the authorities.
The victim, properly identified as Steven Douglas Lloyd, 34, may have died from blunt force trauma to the head, Sheriff Jones continued.
That’s when authorities reportedly issued an arrest warrant for Nicholas Wayne Hamlett, 45, of South Carolina, after realizing the man allegedly used the victim’s identity before the body was found .
The forty-year-old was already wanted for violating one of the clauses of his parole, according to NBC News.
According to the investigation, the accused had become friends with the victim during the summer, before luring him into the woods to take his life and steal his identity, the sheriff said on Facebook.
The authorities managed to catch the forty-year-old on Sunday, after an employee of a hospital in South Carolina recognized him before alerting the authorities, according to the American media.
His identity would have been confirmed by his fingerprints while the man was in custody on Sunday awaiting extradition to Tennessee, Columbia police said, according to NBC News.
