Offbeat News: Farmer forced to cut off his arm with a penknife

A farmer was forced to cut off his arm with a penknife after getting pulled into a piece of farm machinery.

Brave Sampson Parker made the gruesome decision after the machine blew up and a raging fire broke out around him. When he first got stuck Parker called out for help, but when no one came to his aid he began to cut off his fingers using the pocketknife.

But before he could get free the machine burst into flames, and the farmer had to hack off the whole limb. "If I was going to die here, I was going to put up a fight, and that's basically what I did," said Parker from Kershaw County, South Carolina.

"I went up with my hand and the roller that takes the shucks off the corn had grabbed the glove and pulled my hand into the rollers. "The more I tried pulling my hand out, the farther up my hand went."

"My skin was melting because of the flames. It was dripping off my arm like plastic, plastic melting. Parker said as the flames intensified he made a snap decision and grabbed his knife again. "And I just jammed it into my arm, just like that, just started cutting away from the bone - it just dropped."

"It is by the Grace of God that I was not burned up."

Parker, who only farms part-time, says he has now accepted what happened to him. "I am doing great, I am doing very good. It is a little bit strange to see the machine, but came out here one Sunday morning before church said a little prayer to God and that has made it good.

"It really doesn't bother me a bit. "I just told myself 'I am not going to die here' and I just kept on fighting and kept on praying and then when I did get loose I jumped up running with blood squirting from my arm.

I think if the fire hadn't started I would probably have passed out there and the machine would have pulled my arm in even further and down here by myself it would have been hours before anyone came looking for me. If it wasn't for the fire I would have died. The only pain I felt was when the knife was in the arm and in the nerves, that was the pain."

After removing his arm Parker got to his truck and drove down the road to the front of his house.

A number of motorists refused to stop to help him, until firefighter Doug Spinks noticed what had happened. "There were several people who went around me, I pulled into the middle of the road to get someone to stop for me but people still went around me on the grass. But thank goodness for Doug."

Spinks, who is used to dealing with emergencies, says he was shocked at what he saw when he came across Sampson. "I was shocked by what I saw when Sampson opened his truck door. I was stunned, but all the training kicked in and I went to work and focused on what I was doing and the person I was working on.

"I was not going to let him die there, but I did think I had done all I could do and maybe he would not survive this."

Sampson hopes to be fitted with a prosthetic arm by the end of the year, and has gone back to work on a construction site.