Towing costs more than an arm and leg nowadays

A 54-year-old employee of a Pontiac car repair shop apparently decapitated himself early Thursday using a cable and the thrust of his tow truck.

Authorities in Livingston County released few details of the death and declined to identify the man pending notification of relatives. The man’s employer called the death outside the shop a suicide.

The man, who had worked at S&R Route 66 Auto Center on the western edge of Pontiac for about four years, appears to have tied a cable to a sign in front of the business and the other end around his neck.

Then, at about 4:30 a.m., he got inside his tow truck and popped the clutch.

The truck careened through the S&R parking lot and adjacent Superior Gyros parking lot eastward, then struck a sign and crossed old Route 66. It went down an embankment and came to rest behind a business on the other side of the road.

When police arrived, they found the man’s head in the S&R parking lot and his body inside the truck.

Sounds deliberate to me. I guess that it beats getting decapitated by a telephone guide wire by your drunk-driving buddy.