It was around 10:30 p.m. Saturday when the Riverside Police Department in California began receiving strange calls of a severed hand found on the sidewalk in the downtown area of the city.
According to police, the hand was spotted at 5th Street and Fairmount Boulevard in Riverside, located around 50 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
Previously, severed hands have been found washed up on Scottish beaches, according to a 2008 article in Reuters. A decade later, Russian authorities launched an investigation after a bag of 54 severed human hands was found near the Siberian city of Khabarovsk, according to Time Magazine.
Last month, new research about the practice of severing hands in ancient Egypt was published in the Nature journal.
In this case, Riverside police heard from a local hospital that a male patient in his 60s came in missing a hand. He said that the appendage had been cut off by “someone swinging a sword.”
“Our detectives with the Robbery-Homicide Unit responded to assume the investigation are developing leads into how this occurred and who is may be suspected of cutting the victim’s hand off,” said a statement provided to Audacy by Riverside Police Department PIO officer Ryan Railsback. “All we really know at this point is that it appears both the victim and suspect are homeless and are familiar with each other. This does not seem to be a random attack.”
Railsback said there were no further details available as of Tuesday afternoon. Detectives continue to follow up on the case, he added.
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