Mystery blood at Bend Walmart resolved

The mystery of a large amount of blood found Friday at the Walmart expansion site in Bend has been resolved, in somewhat bizarre fashion, police said Monday.

Sgt. Todd Fletcher had said Friday that workers arriving at the construction area off Third Street and Pinebrook Boulevard “found a piece of concrete with blood on it, and some blood on the ground.”

“There’s no body, there’s nobody hurt,” he said Friday. “We didn’t find anything (else) in there.”

But in case it was something criminal, a crime scene worker was taking samples of the blood, to confirm it was human blood.

“Detectives are out here, just in case this turns into something else,” Fletcher said at the time. “Right now, we’re just trying to figure out what we’ve got.”

On Monday, Fletcher said that as police wrapped up their work and began to leave on Friday, a Walmart worker approached and told them it was his blood, and provided cellphone photo evidence it was true.

The man told officers he’d been in an argument with his girlfriend and later began cutting his arms, took photos of it and sent them to her. But he said he couldn’t stop the bleeding, so he wrapped them in a shirt, then in duct tape.

“The scene had a lot of blood,” Fletcher said. “The concerning thing was a piece of broken concrete, about the size of a softball, covered in blood.”