March 9 (UPI) — Two women in Ohio are facing charges after allegedly moving the body of their dead roommate into a car and driving to the bank to withdraw money from the deceased man’s account.
Loreen Feralo and Karen Casbohm are charged with gross abuse of a corpse and theft from a person in a protected class after they propped up the body of 80-year-old Douglas Layman in a pickup truck and drove to an Ashtabula, Ohio, bank earlier this month, Police Chief Robert Stell announced Friday.
Stell said that after Feralo, 55, and Casbohm, 63, found their roommate Layman deceased on Monday, they took his body to a bank, withdrawing an undisclosed amount of cash.
The two had previously accompanied Layman to the same bank.
The women then dropped Layman’s body off at a hospital emergency department in the city of approximately 18,000 people, located 53 miles northeast of Cleveland.
“Before dropping him off they went through a bank drive-thru with him propped up in the passenger seat so that the teller could see him,” Stell said. “They tried to withdraw money from his account. The bank had allowed this previously as long as they were accompanied by him.”
One of the women later called the Ashtabula County Medical Center to make sure Layman was properly identified. That led police to the duo.
A judge this week set Casbohm’s bail at $5,000 while Feralo is due to be arraigned on March 14.
“It’s a very sad commentary on how desperate these two must have been for whatever reason they were doing this,” Ashtabula City Solicitor Cecilia Cooper told WEWS-TV.
“I couldn’t believe it, and then I wondered how could somebody do that?”
