A West Virginia man is accused of pretending to kill himself to avoid conviction for failing to register as a sex offender.

Jesse Lee Wood allegedly tried to make it look like he jumped into the Ohio River from the Ravenswood Bridge on Thursday morning, a day before he was faced with a judge, according to WCHS.

Wood parked his truck near the bridge overnight and emailed an acquaintance a suicide note indicating where his things could be found, cops at the station said.

When first responders arrived at the scene, they found his vehicle nearby and his cell phone on the ledge of the bridge between West Virginia and Ohio, according to the report.

“When we got there, we found what was originally believed to be a legitimate horseman,” Jackson County Sheriff Ross Mellinger said during a briefing on the incident. “We’ve had several here over the years and overall it didn’t look very different from what we’ve had in the past.”

After cops learned that Wood was due to be sentenced by Jackson County Circuit Court the next day, they checked his home and found him hiding in a closet, the sheriff said.

“We asked him right away why on earth would you want people to believe that you would want to kill yourself and jump off that bridge?” Mellinger said. “His only response was ‘because I wanted them to believe it.’ So we have to believe wholeheartedly at this point that it was straight into the impending court day.”

The cops would have thought that Wood was planning to wait for the cops to leave the scene, then pick up his car and hit the road.

He was accused of falsifying an emergency report and sent to jail, authorities said.