This has to be the strangest Father’s Day gift ever.
Kevin Ewing, from Tacoma, Washington, was taking a casual walk along the beach with his family on Father’s Day when he noticed a neatly gift-wrapped package lying in the sand. Considering the occasion, he decided to open it and found inside a feather, burnt grass, sage, lavender, some tobacco, and a cloth wrapped around a severed human toe.
The item was carefully wrapped like a celebratory gift and resting near the park’s property line, as reported by Federal Way Mirror.
Thinking it might be a prayer box or a mysterious message washed ashore, curiosity got the better of him – and he carefully opened the package.
But as he peeled back the cloth concealing the contents, he came face-to-face with a mutilated, decomposing human toe.
“At first, I was very shocked, and it took me a few minutes to kind of be like, ‘Is this what I think it is?'” Ewing told the outlet. “Then once it dawned on me that that’s what it was, I set everything down.”
‘You know, it’s just very creepy,’ he added to KIRO News. ‘It’s like something you would see in a horror movie.’
Creepy doesn’t quite capture this scenario. Alarming, maybe; morbid, certainly. If it were wartime, one might speculate if it belonged to an unfortunate sailor whose ship encountered a toe-pedo, but that certainly isn’t the case here. Additionally, it seems the toe-pagraphy of the beach didn’t provide any further clues.
According to WSP Trooper Rick Johnson, an alert was sent to all law enforcement agencies to cross-reference any open cases that might be connected, as reported by the Federal Way Mirror.
The toe was turned over to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office for DNA testing and identification.
In an incident report obtained by the outlet, the toe – which was found to be accompanied by another piece of organic matter – was believed to be about the size of an adult male’s.
I won’t speculate on what the other “piece of organic matter” might be. Anything I could offer would be a guess, and I’m really trying to put my best foot forward here. Although, we may know one thing. Rumor has it that the toe and other package contents were taken away in – of course – a truck.
