Claude White, 34, was arrested in April in Elizabethton, Tenn., and charged with stealing a forklift, which sheriff’s deputies later found overturned in the middle of a road, but with a pair of shoes and socks trapped underneath. Around the same time, a call came from Sycamore Shoals Hospital about a patient (White) telling an odd story of how he had suffered a foot-mangling (but not mentioning a forklift). By that time, however, deputies had found an exact match for the patient’s missing toe, inside the sock that was inside the shoe that was underneath the forklift.
This article appears in Jun 6-12, 2007.