In South Africa, we have a lot of hijackings, and for a while the favoured method to stop a car was to play dead in the road. Of course it doesn’t take long for people to figure out that stopping to help people on the road is a bad idea and that is where my friend of a friend joins the story.

On his way home from work one night (he lived on a small-holding), he sees a body in the road about 1km from his house. He quickly realised what was up and decided to just drive up onto the pavement (kerb for the Yanks I think), and go around the body without stopping. He got home about 2 minutes later, ran inside and called the police. When he saw them coming down the road, he returned to where he had seen the body to tell them where to start their search. Obviously there was no body, but what they did find was quite surprising. Three dead hijackers hiding in the long grass on kerb, as it turns out, when he had driven up on the kerb to avoid the “dead” guy, he had crushed all of the accomplices.

The “dead guy” was never found as far as I know.