S.F. police looking for owner of abandoned prosthetic leg

A prosthetic leg with a man’s shoe was found at Eighth and Market streets. A prosthetic leg with a man’s shoe was found at Eighth and Market streets. Photo: San Francisco Police Department / San Francisco Police Department Photo: San Francisco Police Department / San Francisco Police Department Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close S.F. police looking for owner of abandoned prosthetic leg 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Someone in San Francisco is missing a leg, and the cops have it.

It’s worth $7,000, and probably a lot more to the person it belongs to. It’s a prosthetic right leg, and it comes with a man’s brown shoe, in good repair.

Officer Julio Bandoni found the leg last week at Eighth and Market streets. It was leaning against a tree trunk, in front of a mobile-phone store.

“I grabbed it, for safekeeping,” the alert officer said.

Bandoni didn’t figure he would have it long. He figured whoever lost it would have stepped forward by now.

But no one has. So Bandoni called around. The first thing he did was check with a one-legged panhandler who works in front of Westfield San Francisco Centre and who takes off his leg to attract more sympathy and money.

The man was working as usual, but his artificial leg was hooked onto the back of his wheelchair. So it wasn’t his.

Bandoni then got in touch with his friend Michael Plafker, a maker of artificial limbs, who checked the leg and said it had not been made by him as, in his trade, you do not forget the appearance of an artificial limb after you make one.

“It wasn’t my style,” Plafker said.

Plafker said lost limbs do happen, although a layman might not understand how. Occasionally an owner removes a limb to bathe or swim. Plafker recalled the famous case of a man whose leg came off and floated away while he was swimming in the Hamptons, in New York. Three months later, the leg turned up in Montauk, 30 miles away.

Plafker makes a half-dozen limbs a month. A poor man’s leg does not look like a wealthy man’s leg. A high-end, above-the-knee leg can run $100,000. It would come with a computer-controlled knee and a foot that can sense what direction its owner wants to go.

A poor man’s leg, with basic features, costs only a few thousand dollars. The leg Bandoni found is more in that category.

Perhaps the leg was stolen by a black-hearted soul who came across it at the edge of a swimming pool and who figured to cash in on eBay, only to dump the leg after reality set in.

“There is no secondary market for artificial legs,” Plafker said. “Each one is custom. They can be sold for parts, however, if you know what someone is looking for.”

Paula Lynch, a prosthetist on Geary Boulevard, said limbs are occasionally lost by patients with cognitive issues. “Or it could have been someone who was rushed to the hospital and the limb was left behind,” she said.

Lynch, however, has not heard of any missing legs in the close-knit world of San Francisco prostheses.

Lynch said she had heard of a knee brace that was stolen from a parked car and turned up for sale at the Ashby BART Station flea market in Berkeley, a tale that can show how low human beings can sink.

Shown a photograph of the leg, Lynch said it looked like her work, although she could not be sure. She said it might belong to a patient who she heard had recently died. Without checking the serial number of the foot, she said, it was hard to be sure. All of her feet have numbers.

And that would still not explain how the leg was separated from its owner and wound up on the sidewalk.

Bandoni said the owner of the leg, providing he is alive, should contact San Francisco police. Bandoni is storing it safe and sound in a police locker.

“Better not say where,” Bandoni said, perhaps to prevent the leg from going missing again.

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com