Strange theory about man who cut his hand off at the Super Halal Meat Market

WaPo ran this horrifying, yet oddly compelling, story about a man who cut his hand off at a meat store in Virginia.

You should read the story, it's amazing and the writer does a nice job describing something that is very hard to imagine happening.

Now I don't know about you, but when I read something that intrigues me I come up with a bunch of ideas about what could have happened, what might happen next, why it happened, etc. I'm not saying I think this happened at all, I'm just saying it COULD have happened.

Let's look at a couple of facts.

Nothing seemed amiss when the man approached the meat counter with his teenage son, Asghar said. The butcher said he recognized the man, whose name he did not know, as a fellow Pakistani. The man chatted on a cellphone as Asghar cut his chicken.

And

The customer ran down the Springfield store's center aisle and into the front parking lot, leaving a trail of blood and yelling repeatedly that he was "not a terrorist." Outside, another witness said, the man announced that he had used the meat saw to cut off his hand "for Allah."

So we have a man who was acting pretty normally, talking on the phone and then he freaks out, cuts off his hand, and makes some unusual sorts of statements, did it for Allah and not a terrorist.

We can consider for a moment that he is a character in Stephen King's Pulse and received an electronic signal over the cell that caused him to mutilate himself. But Pulse isn't real so we move on.

What if he did get something over the phone though? Let's say he came here to the US to be a terrorist but changed his mind. He has at least on child, let's say they are doing well here. He's on the phone and he gets the message that the time is now, he has to go out and perform his mission, whatever that may be but let's say it's not good.

He doesn't want to do it so he cuts his hand off and starts saying he's not a terrorist and in fact if he were supposed to do something for Allah, he's done it, he's sacrificed his hand so now he's off the hook.

As I said, not very likely but you know if I wrote this as a short story and submitted it to the right venue, it would do very well in certain circumstances. The Terrorist Who Changed His Mind Because He Loved America. I'm just sayin'