A 20-year-old Arkansas man this week shot himself and tried to blame it on a random black man — but his lies quickly fell apart when he was confronted by his own mother.

Local news station WTVM 9 reports that a 20-year-old man from Jonesboro, Arkansas told a law enforcement officer that he’d been shot with his own gun after a struggle with a black man who had tried to take the gun away from him.

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The man, who had been admitted to St. Bernards Medical Center to be treated for the wound, told the officer that a “black male wearing all black ran up to him and pulled a gun from his hip area and pointed it at him.” In the ensuing struggle over the gun, the man said, the black man had fired off a shot and hit him in the hand.

However, the man’s mother knew that this story was complete fiction, as it turns out the man had simply accidentally shot himself. After confronting him about his falsehoods, he eventually went to police and admitted that he made up the entire story.

In reality, the man shot himself after he started playing with a random gun that he happened to find on the ground, and his mother explained to police that he “was scared to tell the truth because he doesn’t want to go to jail.”