A West Virginia woman emerged from a two-year-long coma to identify her brother as the attacker that beat her into unconsciousness, a new report said.
Wanda Palmer had been savagely bludgeoned in the head with a machete or hatchet at her Cottageville home in June 2020, West Virginia MetroNews reported Friday.
“When we got there, to be honest we thought she was dead,” Jackson County Sherriff Ross Mellenger said, according to the outlet.
Detectives had not been able to identify her assailant and were shocked when they got a call from Palmer’s care facility last week saying that the victim had regained consciousness.
“We had a little bit of an idea what happened, but the problem was with the nuts and bolts of the case we had nothing to go on. There was no eye witnesses, nobody lived in the home, no surveillance footage, no cellphone records. There was virtually nothing there to move forward on,” Mellenger said, according to the outlet.
Despite suffering severe brain damage, Palmer could still communicate with detectives and told them her brother Daniel Palmer was the man who clobbered her comatose, the report said.
“The keys to the whole thing lay with the victim herself and with her unable to communicate we were left with nothing. Now lo and behold two years later and boom, she’s awake and able to tell us exactly what happened,” Mellenger said.
Daniel Palmer was reportedly arrested for attempted murder and malicious wounding.