‘Let’s eat, Grandma’ is a sentence often used to show the danger of getting your commas wrong. Omit one there and you risk coming across as Hannibal Lecter.
Yet in an almost unimaginable scene witnessed by police in Richmond, California, on Monday, that comic punctuation peril found its horrific embodiment.
Officers responding to a 911 call at around 2 p.m. allegedly caught 37-year-old Dwayne Wallick in the act of consuming his own grandmother.
The woman, 90-year-old Ruby Wallick, was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the Mercury News.
The abominable discovery followed a report of a man seen standing over the bloody body of a woman on the 1200 block of Club Court, a quiet residential part of the Bay Area city where Wallick lives with his grandmother.
Police arrived at the home to find Wallick straddling his grandmother’s body and “digging into her flesh,” Richmond homicide Sgt. Aaron Pomeroy said on Tuesday.
When Wallick refused to stop what he was doing, officers tried subduing him with a Taser gun. However, Wallick continued to struggle and four officers were eventually needed to place him in handcuffs, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Wallick, who was not previously known to police, was taken to hospital for medical evaluation. He remained there Tuesday while receiving treatment for unspecified injuries.
The exact cause of Ruby Wallick’s death is yet to be made public, but police are expected to file murder charges against her grandson.
Investigators are also considering the possibility that drug use played a role in the crime.
“In 26 years of law enforcement it’s the worst thing I have ever seen,” Pomeroy said.