On Saturday, people driving at the Florida Turnpike were in for an unusual event. A Florida man was riding the hood of a semi-truck for nine miles, and it was caught on video.
The man riding the hood, whose name is yet to be identified, drove southbound in a Toyota SUV with another person when he started behaving irrationally. He stopped the SUV near an exit ramp to Boynton Beach. Boynton Beach is a city located on the southeast Florida coast, 30 miles north of Fort Lauderdale.
The driver then left the car and started walking down the highway. He jumped over the concrete fence and walked into ongoing traffic. This caused a traffic jam on the northbound lane, slowing all traffic in the direction.
The resulting jam slowed the moving vehicles just enough for the man to jump on the hood of a semi-truck. He hung on the hood, hitting the windshield with a metal bar as the truck drove down the highway.
A passerby, Erik Morales, captured the incident on video and shared it on his Facebook page. The video went viral after director Billy Corben, an avid “Florida Man” meme fan, shared the video on his Twitter.
The trucker drove for nine miles until he was pulled by Florida Highway Patrol. The man riding the hood was taken into custody.
From the video, it is evident that the man did damage on the windshield of the truck, and the trucker can be seen trying to shake off the man from the hood by braking and swerving the truck.
WSVN News had an interview with Morales, who said, “I zoom ahead of him, and I see a guy on the hood smashing the windshield with a flat bar, and then he took out the driver’s side window… The guy on the hood had blood all over his face. He was only wearing socks and underwear.”
Morales went a step further, though, as, during the incident, the man hanging from the hood kept screaming, “Call the police, call the police!” In the video, one can hear Morales’ girlfriend asking, “Should we call the police?”
Morales added the following regarding the arrest: “They took him down. He lay on his belly, put his hands down forward, and they grabbed him by his hands, and yanked him onto the ground and put him in cuffs,… He just wanted it to be over. He was pretty tired from hanging onto the hood of the truck, so he just kind of gave up there. This is Florida at its finest.”
The unidentified man is pending a mental evaluation. Luckily, nobody got hurt during the incident.
