The thing with setting disfiguring booby traps around your outdoor illegal grow operations is that you’ve got to remember you’ve set them. Case and point: the nearly-headless Daniel Ricketts.
Police say Rickets was drunkenly zipping around a field in upstate New York on Saturday when he ran afoul of a length of piano wire he had strung up around the perimeter of a patch police say he was growing.
As you would expect when a human neck meets with a piece of tense metal cord, the collision ended rather gruesomely and the 50-year-old’s head was sliced nearly clean off his body.
Hikers in the area later spotted the body and called police, who say they found both barbed wire traps as well as a leg trap used to catch wild animals set up around Ricket’s four plant grow operation.
That’s right: four plants.
Police say it isn’t uncommon for guerrilla growers to operate in the area and that they often set up means of protection around their plants.
“They go up there and they’ll grow marijuana on a lot of the state lands. Fortunately hikers, people out and about, neighbors will call us and they’ll tell us,” Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple told local CBS6.
Police say Rickets was killed on his own land.