Someone in Alabama was put on trial for trying to kill his wife, but she lied against him and the judges found him guilty.
Brian Mann, who is 36 years old, found guilty on Thursday, after his hearing began earlier this week. His ex-wife, Hannah Pettey, 25, who he tried to kill, testified against him. She has since recovered from the lead poisoning he tried to give her during a construction job at his chiropractic office.
According to what she said, Mann bought several life insurance plans on her after she got sick and told her not to go to the hospital.
This week, news from the courtroom included details from Pettey’s testimony as well as evidence from an insurance agent who worked with the couple. Reports say that Pettey said Mann bought “a lot of insurance policies” that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
Pettey allegedly said that many of those rules were made after she got sick and had to go to the hospital for what turned out to be lead poisoning. During her stay in the hospital, Pettey said her husband seemed more interested in the rules than in her health. Pettey said that Mann made her wear ankle weights when she was weighed by doctors to make up for the weight she had lost while she was sick. This was because she had to be healthy in order to be covered.
Pettey said in court that she had lost 40 pounds between September 2021 and January 2022. Symptoms started for her in August 2021. They included severe, even excruciating, pain in her back and belly, feeling dizzy, and being sick. She said Mann was giving her something from his office that she thought was a multivitamin.
Pettey said that Mann “was probably the nicest he’d been in our marriage during those critical months” while she was sick. She told him to bring her “vitamins and water” because she couldn’t eat. He also told her not to go to the hospital, even though her symptoms were very bad. Pettey finally got to the hospital when her mother took her to see her doctor, who thought she might have stomach cancer.
Mann didn’t know about that trip to the doctor.
Pettey said that Mann kept her away from her family while she was sick. Her condition got so bad after she got to the hospital that she started having “hallucinations.” When it turned out that Mann had poisoned her, Pettey’s family wouldn’t let him talk to her, which made her “distraught.” “I didn’t understand that at the time,” she said.
Also, Pettey told the lawyer for her husband’s defense that Mann was “begging” her to stop the probe into him.
“Looking back, I was alone,” she said later. She told the judge that Mann didn’t want her to work and deleted her social media accounts after they got married in 2018.
Pettey told the judge that Mann’s attempt to kill her meant that there is still lead in her bones. The numbers were high enough that she couldn’t have children, and she said her hands still hurt.
When it came to the many insurance policies Mann tried to get, agents started to doubt his requests to buy more policies and raise the limits on current ones. Chris Humphreys, a State Farm salesman who helped Mann with his policies, said in court that someone would be looked into if they applied for too many policies at the same company.
Humphreys also said in court that Mann had other life insurance plans on his wife with different companies. He is said to have told the judge, “It’s like throwing spaghetti at the wall if someone goes around and gets a bunch of policies at different companies.”
Mann also tried to convince the police that he and his children were being poisoned with lead. He told a nurse practitioner about it and said he had an X-ray of himself to prove it. She told the cops that he got “visibly nervous” and wanted to leave when the nurse practitioner told him he needed to get another X-ray to see if the poisoning was new or had been going on for a while.
Mann had an X-ray, which showed that he had something in his stomach that had only been there for a short time.
Mann was found guilty of trying to kill someone on Thursday. On Wednesday, the jury thought about the case for two hours, took a break, and then thought about it for another 45 minutes before giving its decision.
He is going to get his sentence on August 27.
