What seems to start out as a fairly controlled dispute between a guy on a sportbike and dude in a sedan devolves into combat when the biker smashes the car’s window with his helmet, and the driver goes after him with a hammer.
The climax of the altercation plays out on this dashcam video, which starts when the Nissan Sentra sedan on the right seems to stop a little short.
We hear a loud engine revving from a motorcycle, the car’s driver makes a gesture out his window, and we can see some sort of conflict is escalating between the person in this car and whoever’s behind them.
The biker walks up to the car’s driver window, and his body language seems relatively calm as the two apparently converse. But when the car window rolls up the biker appears to get properly pissed off—knocking the Nissan’s mirror and punching the door.
As he’s apparently walking back to his bike, he decides to push things a step further and smashes the rear window with his helmet.
Almost immediately, you see the trunk pop and for a second I thought, hell yeah, we’re about to see a real live Trunk Monkey!
But no, the Sentra guy goes for a hammer and takes a pretty earnest swipe at the motorcyclist as he powers off through the intersection.
YouTuber Honest Citizen who appears to have the original upload writes that the incident went down Sept. 6 in Vernon, Los Angeles, California at the corner of Downey and Bandini. They also write that the video’s been passed along to police and local news outlets, but as of Friday NBC reports that neither party in the conflict has been identified or located.
Obviously something went down before the camera started rolling, but nothing excuses either of these people’s violent behavior.
Traffic sucks for all of us, people. Let’s try and get along out there, at least well enough to resist physical assault.
The motorcyclist’s license plate seems fairly visible, I would imagine police will be able to track him down in short order. The Sentra might be tougher with its temporary dealership license plate (there are a staggering number of un-plated cars driving around California), but if this video blows up, the cops might have a boosted motivation to find the car’s driver too.
Hat tip to Swimbikerun!