This Financial Fraudster Made His Son Shoot Him in an Attempt to Stay Out of Prison

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In an desperate attempt to escape prison time and get some disability cash, an Oregon man asked his son to shoot him in the legs the day before he was supposed to show up to serve a ten-year prison sentence for financial fraud, the Associated Press reports.

The liar, Shannon Egeland, not only cooked up that scheme, he told cops he'd stopped to help a pregnant driver on the side of the road in Caldwell, Idaho, when someone bopped him on the head and then shot him in the legs. In reality, the 41-year-old had asked his teenage son to do the damage with a shotgun, not only to stave off his prison sentence, but also to collect on a disability insurance policy he had applied for a week before the shooting.

Egeland not only had an amputation as a result of the shooting, which he admitted to planning, he now may be facing even more prison time on top of the sentence he was scheduled to serve for engaging in mortgage fraud as part of an Oregon operation called Desert Sun Development.

Between 2004 and 2008, he and 12 other employees raked in $19 million in their elaborate ruse, which involved falsifying loan documents for construction projects that never materialized. Those ill-gotten gains, prosecutors said, were used to pay for boats, cars, and other luxuries. Egeland was sentenced to ten years in 2014, more than any of his co-conspirators, because he unbelievably continued his criminal activities after pleading guilty in the Desert Sun case—selling prescription drugs near a school in 2010, then shoplifting $9 worth of stuff from a Fred Meyer in 2013.

He also lied on his application for disability insurance when he said that he hadn't been arrested in the past ten years.

Egeland will be sentenced for this latest misdeed in October. He pled guilty to charges of willful failure to pay child support and wire fraud on Wednesday, and prosecutors are asking the judge to tack on another five years to his sentence.

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