By Tim Binnall
A pair of men in Ireland allegedly took a page out of the classic comedy Weekend at Bernie's by way of an ill-conceived caper in which they brought a dead man's body into a post office in an attempt to fool workers into giving them his pension check. The bizarre incident reportedly occurred on Friday morning in the community of Carlow when the two individuals entered the establishment with an elderly gentleman propped up between them. Although seemingly standing on his own two feet, the man in the middle had an ashen face and appeared out of sorts, which caused a worker at the post office to contact the authorities.
Realizing that their brazen and bizarre plan had quickly gone awry, the pair of miscreants proceeded to drop the man on the floor and fled the scene. When police arrived, they quickly determined that their companion was, in fact, the dead body of an area resident who had apparently just recently died. Authorities set about trying to get to the bottom of the weird case, while the mayor of the town decried the jaw-dropping attempt to pilfer the man's pension. "I was absolutely shocked to hear about what happened," declared Ken Murnane, "I cannot believe anyone would do something like that. It beggars belief."
Since Carlow is a rather small town, it didn't take long for police to determine that the dead man was a resident by the name of Peadar Doyle and that the two individuals who had brought his body to the post office were his nephew, Declan Haughney, and a friend. Now seen as something of a villain to the community, the man behind the very strange visit to the post office claims that he actually thought his uncle was still alive when they arrived at the building and that the man must have passed away somewhere during the journey. "He was walking like normal," Haughney recalled, "then all of a sudden he started going all slumpy."
Insisting that he would not be so foolish as to drag his uncle's dead body into the post office in order to rob him, Haughney mused "am I cuckoo? I'm not." While the nephew's story sounds hard to believe, especially since the two men abandoned the corpse and took off running when the worker called the cops, authorities have actually not ruled out such a scenario and are studying security camera footage of the short walk from Doyle's house to the building to see if they can determine if he really did die along the way or perhaps when the trio arrived at the post office. While they wait for the investigation to conclude, the elderly man's family reportedly laid him to rest over the weekend with, ironically, his nephew carrying him once again, this time as a pallbearer.