Like a high-stakes version of a person with food in their teeth but nobody’s said anything yet, an 18-wheeler driver told police recently that he didn’t notice a car skidding along on the front of his truck as he pushed it down a San Antonio highway. The driver of the car had minor injuries, according to reports.
San Antonio station KSAT reports that the car, which looks like a Mercedes-Benz SLK from a few years back, was on Interstate 35 going through the city when this all happened. According to KSAT, the accident report said the SLK driver, Leon Morris, merged onto the highway from the right side as the truck driver, Raymond Morales, switched into the right lane. Sketches from the report recreating the crash show the vehicles merging right into each other. (KSAT has a sketch via the Texas Peace Officer Crash Reports, which can be seen here.)
The crash led to this scene, which a person in another vehicle, Adrian Lopez, posted videos of on his Facebook profile. There’s one video below, plus two more that can be seen here and here.
There aren’t any videos of the truck coming to a stop, but its lights are flashing in the one above.
Lopez captioned the video above saying the truck pushed the SLK for “like a whole mile,” but KSAT didn’t say whether the accident report had a distance listed. It did say that truck driver Morales told police he didn’t realize the car was on the front of his 18-wheeler at first. From KSAT:
Morales told police he didn’t realize he was dragging the Mercedes at first and tried to stop when he realized there was a car in front of his big rig, according to the report.
Morris was taken to the hospital and Morales was visibly shaken, but the report doesn’t go into further detail.
Dallas-area station WFAA reports that police said they didn’t think it was part of a road-rage incident, and Lopez didn’t seem to either. From WFAA:
According to police, due to the obvious difference in size, the 18 wheeler did not initially feel the crash and continued driving. A short time later the driver noticed something was wrong and immediately pulled over. There were no indications of any road rage and no intentional acts and the contributing factor was listed as driver inattention. [...]
According to Lopez, the Mercedes cut the 18-wheeler off when getting onto the highway. “They were too close to the 18-wheeler and ended up getting caught in front of it,” he said.
Lopez thinks it was the truck driver’s quick thinking that likely prevented a tragedy.
Lopez also told WFAA that while the driver of the Mercedes “seemed really scared,” he thinks the truck driver “kept it under control and he knew what he was doing to make sure no one else got hurt.”