Kevin Ewing, Tacoma, Washington state man walking along beach at Washington State Park on Father’s Day finds severed toe in gift box leading to more questions than answers.
A man strolling along a sandy beach in Washington state was left horrified after finding a neatly wrapped gift along the shore containing a severed, human toe.
Kevin Ewing, of Tacoma, was enjoying a Father’s Day walk with his family along the beach at Dash Point State Park last month when he spotted a small box.
The item was carefully wrapped like a celebratory gift and resting near the park’s property line.
Thinking it might be a prayer box or a mysterious message washed ashore, curiosity got the better of him – as Ewing proceeded to carefully open the package.
Peeling back a green cloth concealing the contents, Ewing’s eyes landed on a pale pine box, oddly sealed shut with tape, as if to keep its contents hidden and protected.
He then pulled out his pocket knife to cut through the tape, revealing a strange assortment of items inside – a feather, burnt grass, sage, lavender, tobacco and a rag concealing something mysterious. And how!
It was upon opening the box that Ewing came face-to-face with a mutilated, decomposing human toe according to the Federal Way Mirror.
‘At first I was very shocked, and it took me a few minutes to kind of be like, “is this what I think it is?”‘ Ewing told the outlet. ‘Then once it dawned on me that that’s what it was, I set everything down.’
‘I found what looked like a little Christmas package in a little square box wrapped in green cloth and yellow string,’ Ewing told FOX5.
‘I set the box down on the ground, I believe, and I used my knife to pick the rag up and open it, and it was a severed human big toe that was in there,’ Ewing recalled.
‘You know, it’s just very creepy, it’s like something you would see in a horror movie.’
The gruesome discovery came after Ewing wandered ahead of his family, making his way toward the tide line as he searched the sand for feathers scattered along the packed sand.
Ewing, who proudly embraces his Native American heritage, sensed the box held a deeper, spiritual meaning – especially given the eerie timing of discovering a neatly wrapped gift on Father’s Day itself.
The incident left the dad wondering how the big toe came to end up in the box, who put it there, whose toe it belonged to, was there another box nearby with other body parts? And was this all part of something criminal?
‘Just very odd. The toe definitely did not look like it was amputated. It definitely didn’t look like a surgeon had taken it off. It didn’t look like a very clean medical cut,’ the mystified man said.
‘You know, a lot of things are going through my head like, “Where is the rest of the body?” Like, “Did this wash in from the tide, from the water? Did somebody leave this here intentionally to be found?”‘ Ewing told KIRO.
‘Maybe there’s somebody out there playing some kind of, you know, weird, weird and sick game,’ he told KIRO.
He quickly snapped photos of the grim discovery, hurried back to his wife and together, they approached a park ranger to report what they had found.
Washington State Patrol (WSP) sent an alert was sent to all law enforcement agencies to cross-reference any open cases that might be connected.
The toe was turned over to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office for DNA testing and identification.
In an incident report the toe was believed to be about the size of an adult male’s.
On Friday, Public Health – Seattle & King County revealed that the toe was found to have been medically amputated – meaning it had no relation to a death, as reported by KIRO 7 News.
No further investigation will be conducted by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, as the case is now closed shut.
Officials have yet to say whose toe it may have belonged to, as it’s unlikely that they will necessary come to know… least of all why the amputee decided to set it to sail into the wild and into the ocean.
