What looked to be either an incredible rescue or an unimaginable tragedy turned into a full-blown farce for police in Hudson, New York when they smashed into a car to ostensibly save a dying woman.
The weird incident began with a frantic call from a woman saying that she had just spotted an elderly woman who had frozen to death in the front seat of a car.
When officers arrived on the scene, they saw the distressed senior inside the car and she was wearing an oxygen mask and appeared unresponsive.
Realizing that the car had been parked overnight, the cops began imagining the worst and set about the grim task of extracting the frozen woman from the vehicle.
However, after they smashed a window in the backseat of the car and gained access to the vehicle, the officers realized that the 'frozen woman' was, in fact, an incredibly realistic mannequin!
Ironically, when the owner of the car arrived to retrieve it, he revealed that the doll has a bit of life-saving experience herself in that she is a specially-designed mannequin for CPR classes.
As a sale manager for the company that makes the device, the man claimed that he drives with the lifeless woman in the passenger side of the car and even has her wear a seatbelt.
While he probably said that is because of the fragility of the doll, one suspects that it may also be either a ruse to use carpool lanes or simply to have some company during long drives between sales meetings.
Regardless, he was not too thrilled with the Hudson police and reportedly responded to their actions with an expletive-laden rant.
Nonetheless, officials in the city say that they stand by their decision to smash into the car and admonished the man for not leaving the mannequin in the backseat where it would have looked less alarming.
That's easy for them to say, but they wouldn't have had to work with her the next day.
Source: ABC News