Ill. man has car part removed from arm 51 years after accident

Decades after a car wreck a mystery has been solved for a Granite City, Illinois, man. He had an unusual object removed from his arm and had no clue it was connected to the crash.

In 1963 Arthur Lampitt was driving home when the roads started to get slick. He hydroplaned, lost control of the car and hit a semi-truck head-on.

“I had four or five busted ribs and my hip socket was busted out the back end,” Lampitt told KTVI TV.

He sustained severe lacerations on his left arm but never thought anything of it.

Thirty-five years later he walked into a courthouse.

“I went through a metal detector and saw that there was a large metal object. I said I don’t understand why that’s there,” Lampitt said.

Neither did doctors. They told Lampitt that a piece of metal may have been inserted during surgery after the accident.

He lifted a concrete block last week and his muscles tightened up and his arm began to swell. Lampitt went into surgery Wednesday and Dr. Timothy Lang pulled out a seven-inch eroded metal object from Lampitt’s body.

Lampitt said, “That’s the most unusual thing; he’s never seen something like that before.”

Lampitt then did some investigating.

“I went back to look at the old pictures of my wreck and noticed my turn signal was missing,” he said. “We started piecing things together and figured out that is what it was.”