It took nearly three weeks, but a fisherman has been reunited with his prosthetic leg. Two good Samaritans and a Craigslist ad helped Mike Warner, 49, of Green Bay, Wisconsin, get his artificial limb back, but not before it floated three miles downriver from where he lost it.
Warner was fishing Range Line Lake in Wabeno, Wisconsin, last month when his canoe overturned. He was able to retrieve most of his gear, but the leg was lost to the deep. He returned home and chalked it up as a loss, but a friend urged him to put the details on Craigslist.
“I wasn’t overly worried about it because I use my older model for fishing and hunting,” Warner told the Milwaukee Journal Sentry. “It wasn’t my everyday leg, to put it that way.”
On August 4 Elliot Fuller and his friend Jason Franklin were canoeing along a creek between Richardson and Zaring Lakes, northwest of Range Line, when they saw something unusual sticking out of a beaver dam. They paddled over and began tearing away branches from the object, eventually freeing a prosthetic leg.
“I was sure we had found a dead body that someone dumped into the creek,” Fuller told the Journal Sentry. “We thought it was real at first until we got a closer look.”
It’s unclear whether the two knew about the Craigslist ad before their find or only after, but they somehow learned of it and contacted Warner to return the leg. Warner gave them $50 as a reward for their unusual and unexpected find.
“I just thought [the leg] was gone. I really didn’t expect to see it again,” Warner said. “On my end, it’s pretty amazing and it’s pretty bizarre where it ended up.”
“Just did what I thought was right,” Franklin said. “I hope that if I lost my leg that someone would return it to me, too.”
See the video of the leg’s discovery below.