DEVOUT Christian Tillmon Webb, who apparently weighed 550lb in March of this year, couldn’t afford medical treatment for an injured leg. So he turned instead to God for healing – and died in considerable pain after not moving from his home recliner for EIGHT MONTHS!
Tillmon Webb put his faith in Jesus. Idiot!
According to this report, Tillmon, 33, from Greenwood County, South Carolina, plonked himself down in the recliner with a Bible, and convinced himself that faith alone would be enough to heal the leg.
His wife Ada explained why her husband, covered only in a blanket, remained in the recliner until shortly before he died:
The man totally believed in God and his healing. He couldn’t do nothing for his self.
Webb said that her husband had driven to a doctor’s surgery in March after sustaining the injury.
They were gonna give him an appointment, but they wanted $300 up front, and we didn’t have the money.
He read his Bible daily, he spent his full focus on God. And he was literally waiting and praying for a Job miracle. If anybody knows the Bible and knows Job, he really and fully believed that God was going to heal him just like he did Job, because he said he couldn’t think of a better testimony to go out and to tell people.
For eight months they had no visitors. Webb rarely left his side, and she tried to keep him clean.
I couldn’t get him rolled over to use a bedpan.
Other than eating and reading the Bible, she says Tillmon posted sermons online and texted messages of faith through his cell phone.
He wanted so much to get up and you know, he wanted to tell everybody what Jesus done.
Webb says Tillmon consistently told her not to call for help. She said that finally he was in so much pain that she finally called an ambulance.
Greenwood County authorities say they found Tillmon covered with sores, and that he appeared to weigh about 800 pounds. They say he was stuck to his chair, and they had to saw the recliner apart. They cut a large hole around the front door to get him out. He died shortly after in hospital.
Webb says she has no regrets about leaving him in the recliner.
If I feel anything right now, it’s envy for him … I wish he had taken me with him.
Greenwood County deputies will not charge Webb with a crime. They determined she had no malicious intent of neglect.
Neighbors at the trailer park said they had no idea Webb had a husband inside that trailer the whole time.
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
November 21st, 2009 at 6:52 pm
What sort of person….insert wife here….would permit this to happen. It can only be that she really did believe that an idea called a god would help this man.
Suffering from obesity is a medical condition that is treatable…all you have to do is be careful what you insert in your mouth.
It is ironic that he died from something that came out of his mouth ….”prayer”….to the non existent…..you can’t make this stuff up.
November 21st, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Wow.
I am totally lost for words here. This redefines crazy. It is equally bizarre that they have decided there was no neglect. Someone was allowed to sit in a chair and slowly decompose without anyone bothering to help.
How is that *not* neglect?
November 21st, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Are we sure Tilmon was using the right version of the bible: there are scores of different ones and I have it on excellent authority that only the King James Bible is the real deal. None of the others are the true word and they will not work. Worth checking, I think. Some peope even think that god did not write the bible in English so how crazy is that? I listened to a bible belt preacher (think Elmer Gantry without the brains) who said in amazement that some people allege that Jesus was not White.
November 21st, 2009 at 7:58 pm
This story also shows why we need single payer healthcare here in the US.
November 21st, 2009 at 8:17 pm
libhomo.
Correct. This guy needed $300 and there are millions of people in the USA who could not find $50 for treatement. Meanwhile they are accepting the lies of the vastly rich scum of the Insurance Industry whose top eschelon fly in private jet and dine on the finest china at the expense of the poor. These scum should be shot and the politicians and lobbyists who take their dirty money and lie for them. The USA spends around ten times as much per head on its population’s health as European Countries for one of the worst health services in the West. Apart from the wealthy top tranche.
But the suckers in the USA buy the Death Squads bullshit allegededly in the UK I heard a lying piece of excrement on BBC World Service the other day – and he was a pastor or whatever they call them – lying about “socialist medecine.” Made me puke. In the USA 40 million people cannot find a few dollars for treatment. This piece of human shit said in the UK a decision was made to allow people to die from lack of treatment. The truth: the decision was that the UK decided not to find £5,000 a week to keep some terminally ill patients alive for a few more months.
Better say, that I do not the specific details correct as I do not go around with a notebook in case some lying piece of religious shit decides to correct me.
November 21st, 2009 at 9:38 pm
I kinda have some sympathy for the woman.
Of course, the guy was an idiot to think that God would heal him, but his choice to just deal with it as best he could in the absence of real medical care is not that unusual.
I’m here in the US and I’ve known a few people that have forgone medical care in favor of just dying whenever, however…I know one guy who killed himself after finding out he had a terminal illness, and no family to help him through it…others just keep going till they drop.
My husband is dealing with various medical problems right now and we have a hell of a time just getting a doctor to take any of it seriously, and we at least have the medical insurance they give poor people.
When I tell him to do anything for his health, he ignores me. I have to sit around and watch him endure kidney stones and he won’t even drink a freaking glass of water. So I’m liable to end up like her…watching someone die and not a damn thing you can do about it.
And people in the US are worried about “socialism”!
November 21st, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Broga, I’ve heard that gawd himself wrote the bible in American English and his son was a blonde haired, blue eyed American!
OK this sounds harsh but factual: This guy died because he was a religious nutter who should have spent $300 on health care rather than all the food that caused his death.
November 21st, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Oy.
November 21st, 2009 at 11:04 pm
What gets me riled is the last quote “If I feel anything right now, it’s envy for him … I wish he had taken me with him.”
This demonstrates everything wrong with religion. The woman should have ignored every one of hubby’s deranged prayer demands and gotten the man some help. To let him live like that for months is a disgusting thing and if I pity her, it’s because I hate to think how much brainwashing it took to make a woman not care about helping him get better, to just do as the man said do, regardless of sense.
November 22nd, 2009 at 1:02 am
I don’t know if calling the poor sod an “idiot” is very helpful. It looks to me like a failure of society, not just one individual. An inadequate, profit-obsessed health system, little help from family or friends, and neighbours who didn’t even know he lived there. It’s no wonder people become fixated on fantasy and superstition, in such an uncaring world.
November 22nd, 2009 at 1:16 am
All other considerations apart, the man is said to have gained 250 pounds – about 45% of his previous body weight – in the eight months or so he was collapsed in his chair. That’s over a pound a day. Whatever else he wasn’t doing, it was certainly not eating. Unless he had some remarkable endocrine problem that had made him so gross in the first place, the wife is at least guilty of stuffing him with food. Maybe well-meaning, but surely pig-ignorant at best.
Maybe the American education system is as bad as its public health system.
November 22nd, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Lucky Jean. You have my sympathy and, may I say, my understanding. I know that in the USA patients cannot get a House Call and I also know some endure hell because they worry about the cost to their family. One of my big objections to private medecine is that the doctors are financially motivated to call for every test and charge for it. We are a long we short of providing a good medical service in the UK but the stuff about “death committees” and socialist medicine is rubbish.
Some of the best medicine in the world is in the USA but it costs …and how. I am sorry about your husband’s and your own suffering. Kidney stones pain is about as agonising as it gets although I have not had to suffer it myself.
Regards
November 22nd, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Lucky Jean. I am really sorry you have that terrible problem. Kidney stones is about as agonising as it gets. As for socialist medicine: the lies being told are just that – lies or Insurance Industry propaganda.
November 22nd, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Angela K. That is it. American English – Southern States version. And, indeed, blond and blue eyed.
The food thing. I think they are the porkiest people on the planet now and that means not just fat but clinically obese. Here in the UK we now seem to be on the same track. The trick of making cows arses – and much else even less intially palatible – into something that tastes and looks good via chemical skills has become as art. Again, we are on the same track. I think the mad cow disease owed much to animal shit – why waste good nutrients when the hoi polloi don’t know any better – being recycled. As for battery chickens or Turkeys packed like Japanese on a Tokio Tube train – with Xmas coming up don’t even ask.
November 22nd, 2009 at 3:45 pm
“Other than eating and reading the Bible…”
Neither of which is a proven route to weight loss. Had he dispensed with the lard as well as the Lord, he might have had more success. It’s tragic that people today are still taken in by supernatural mumbo-jumbo.
November 22nd, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Broga: Dismissing people as idiots is something I can sympathize with, but it is important to remember just how rightist and propagandistic the US corporate media are. Imagine if the only media in the UK were run by Rupert Murdoch.
November 23rd, 2009 at 6:06 pm
@libhomo
“Imagine if the only media in the UK were run by Rupert Murdoch.”
Luckily we have laws to stop that kind of thing, for now; can you imagine nothing on telly but X-factor, get me out of here, cops, faddy women’s programs & the simpsons…Worse would be sky news supplanting the beeb! at least you would know that you were right all along, though it would be cold comfort.