Mayor lies in a coffin and pretends to be dead to avoid arrest for breaking lockdown to go drinking

The Mayor of a small town in Peru recently made headlines for pulling off what might the greatest drunk fail of all time. Jaime Rolando Urbina Torres is well on his way to becoming a meme after photos of him lying in a coffin and literally pretending to play dead to avoid arrest went viral on social media. The new viral star pulled out the last drunk trick in his book when the police came looking for him for violating pandemic lockdown regulations while drinking with his friends in the town of Tantará, in the south of the country.

According to Daily Mail, in their drunken desperation to avoid arrest, Torres and his friends hopped into coffins built for coronavirus victims and pretended to be dead when police arrived at the scene of their lockdown party. While it is unclear why there were open caskets close at hand for this particular escape attempt, it is quite evident that the men didn't really think things through before testing out the coffins. For starters, they missed a few crucial details while playing dead, such as the fact that corpses don't necessarily need face masks.

This is reportedly the latest in line of Torres' devil-may-care pandemic behavior as he was previously accused by locals of failing to take the threat of the virus seriously. He is also said to have failed to implement safety precautions in the town, which along with the rest of Peru, was officially placed into lockdown over 60 days ago by the central government. Despite being the mayor, Torres is said to have only spent eight days in the town since the start of the lockdown and shown no interest in enforcing any local safety measures.

The town residents even hauled the absentee mayor to a town meeting on May 9 to defend himself where he launched a series of angry tirades against locals. However, his spirited responses failed to hold up in front of his officials who repeatedly shot down his flimsy excuses for failing to open emergency coronavirus quarantine shelters. Torres was also accused of failing to put in proper safety checks to make sure people from other towns wouldn't be able to enter Tantará and further increase residents' risk of contracting the deadly virus.

Meanwhile, netizens had a field day with the Peruvian mayor's drunken antics with many hailing the police for stopping to snap a picture of the drunk men in the caskets before apprehending them. 

Torres' refusal to perform his mayoral duties is particularly worrisome at this time as the Americas become the epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic. The number of positive coronavirus cases and deaths in the region has been rising at a much higher rate than others. It has reported 2.1million cases of COVID-19 as of now, a higher total than previous epicenter Europe which has 1.9million. Although Europe still has the most deaths of any region—over 169,000—the Americas is well on its way to passing that number. Peru is among the top four countries in terms of rising death rates with a total of 104,020 confirmed cases and 3,024 deaths. 

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