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You can be a victim/survivor of a road rage incident anywhere in the country. Ten years ago while driving to work (midnight shift), I passed a car that appeared to be stopped in the middle of the street of a small town. As I passed the car, I noticed it was speeding up ever so slightly. Suddenly, I felt a crash. The car I passed was smashing into the back of my car. It did so two or three times. I managed to elude the car, and parked my damaged car on a side street. I thought maybe the lunatic had driven off, so I moved my car back to the main road in the middle of this small town.

I was wrong. I saw a car coming down the street in my direction. Fortunately, I was not standing outside my car. The lunatic smashed his car into my car again. Then he drove off. I managed to limp to a side street with my car now totally disabled. As I walked to a telephone to call the police, some young woman drove her car into the parking area where the phone was. The lunatic had attacked her car as well. The young woman was sobbing as she told me her story.

Well, it turned out the lunatic was a parolee from Colorado state prison where he had served six years for a violent assault. He was supposed to be on medication for his (psychotic) illness, but his relatives said he had gone off the medication and disappeared. So he stole a car and drove about 500 miles where I was unfortunate enough to run into him. Actually, he ran into me.

The upshot was, after assaulting me and the young woman, he crashed his car into a fire hydrant and stole another car. He then led a number of county and town cops on a high speed chase out of town. He crashed that car after trying to negotiate a country curve at a high rate of speed. As he emerged from his car in a cornfield (ironically a very short distance from my house), he was facing four county cops who were pointing their pistols at him. The man was armed with a knife which he was told numerous times by the cops to put down. After a few minutes of staring at the cops, the lunatic decided to charge the cops while waving the knife. He was riddled with a lot of bullets and didn't survive his ventilation.

So friends, you can be a victim (or survivor as I look at it) of road rage anywhere. This incident took place in a very small Midwestern town with an almost total absence of violent (or any) crime.