St. Louis Man Unaware He’d Been Stabbed, Another Finds Old Blade Lodged in Back

The knife blade left in McNeely's back.

St. Louis police are searching for the person who allegedly assaulted and stabbed a 57-year-old man. Unfortunately it seems that the investigation is at a standstill because the victim was so intoxicated at the time of the attack that he is unable to provide investigators with certain key bits of information, like where he was, or what the person looked like.

In fact, he was so drunk that he didn’t even know he had been stabbed. If his sister hadn’t found him sitting on the porch bleeding, he might not have noticed at all. Luckily it seems that his injuries were minor enough as to be non life-threatening. According to the police report, the sister, “advised her brother to come inside and lay down because he was intoxicated. When he took off his jacket and shirt, she observed three lacerations to the victim’s chest, neck and back. The victim was very intoxicated and unaware he was stabbed.”

Also recently, Billy McNeely, 32, of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories of Canada discovered that the nagging spot on his back that he was left with after a fight three years ago over a wrist wrestling contest was a nearly three-inch-long piece of the knife blade that had stabbed him five times. The fact that the scar apparently set off metal detectors on a regular basis was attributed to his perhaps having a piece of metal lodged in the bone. No X-rays were ever taken, despite McNeely’s having complained over the years to various nurses and doctors about his discomfort on that spot.

McNeely reportedly sat bolt upright up in bed one night to deal with the burning itch, again, only to find something solid sticking out of his back. With his girlfriend’s help he positioned his shoulder in such a way that she was able to identify what was beginning to protrude: a blade. He rushed to the emergency room where doctors removed the blade and determined that he did not have any permanent damage from its having been in there so long.

Even so McNeely is considering suing the Fort Good Hope health center where he was originally treated for the stab wounds.

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