Tearful body thief gets prison term

Drug transport was aim, he says
August 2, 2005


BY L.L. BRASIER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER



A tearful Detroit man who admitted stealing a body from a Southfield hospital in June told a judge the corpse was to be used to transport cocaine and marijuana, possibly to a contact he had in Chicago.


"I'm deeply sorry," Calvin Spann, sobbing, told Oakland County Circuit Judge John McDonald. "I'm sorry to the family. We did steal your loved one ... and I hope you can forgive me."


"Why'd you do it?" the judge demanded before sentencing him to 2 to 20 years for mutilating a body.


Spann, in a rambling, almost incoherent statement, sometimes crying and moaning, said he and his codefendants, John Cryer II, 31, of Detroit and Lorenzo Baker, 31, of Southfield, stole the body from Providence Hospital as part of a plan to smuggle marijuana and cocaine.


It is not clear whether they were going to place the drugs in the body, or merely provide the body to others, who would fill it with drugs.


It was also not clear where the body was headed once it contained drugs. Spann, 22, told the judge he had been recruited for the scheme by a drug dealer in Chicago.


"I made a terrible mistake," he said. Spann pleaded guilty last month.


The scheme went awry from the beginning.


The three arrived at the hospital pretending to be funeral home workers seeking a woman's body, police said. Instead, they ended up with the body of George Hilton of Benton Harbor, who died June 3.


Police are still not certain why the men were seeking a female. Hilton's body was eventually tossed into a trash bin.


Spann's new revelation of attempted drug trafficking Monday surprised prosecutors. It was originally thought that the thieves wanted the body for an insurance scheme.


"This would be laughable except for the pain and tragedy they caused the family," said Assistant Prosecutor Jason Pernick, saying the case was developing "into a bottomless pit of harebrained schemes."


Cryer was also in court Monday. He told the judge he wants to stand trial.Baker is scheduled for a pretrial hearing Aug. 8.

http://www.freep.com/news...050802.htm

Weird story.

What really gets me, though, is how he owned up to his mistake and apologized. Maybe it happens all the time but you certainly don't hear about those cases often. It's kinda refreshing.

CarrieMpls said:

Yeah its mindblowing that these people thought that they could get away with this. Its funny how he apologized on the day that he was sentenced to up to 20 years in the slammer though. Imagine how the family of the deceased person felt.