EDITORS NOTE: The video above shows hand gestures that may be offensive to some viewers.
TAMPA, Fla. (WFTS/WTVR) – A Tampa woman’s iPhone video captures a man tailgating her and crashing his truck after he cuts her off. The video dubbed “instant karma” was recorded Monday afternoon and has garnered more than 3 million hits and is making its way around the web.
The woman who recorded the video spoke to the local Tampa news station and asked her name not be broadcast or made public. Instead, she is going by her YouTube username, Florida Driver.
“This pathetic excuse for a human being tailgated me for about three minutes. After about a minute, and me shaking my head, I pulled out my phone and started recording,” she posted on YouTube. “I couldn’t move over because there were trucks in the right lane, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to speed on a rainy day with the roads being as slick as they were. I was turning left in about a half-mile when this happened. Now bear in mind, that this guy had already passed a truck in a left turn lane, was tailgating and driving recklessly on a wet slick road, wasn’t paying attention, and all in all being an ignorant ass. In the full video which I will post later, you will be able to see that not once was I mouthing off, I never brake checked him, and in fact until I watched the video after the accident I didn’t even know he shot a bird at me because I wasn’t looking at him at all, I was paying attention to the road while holding the phone up with my right hand. I’ve recorded circumstances like this before, catching idiots doing stupid things, but never ever had this happen.”
“That’s what you get, all on video buddy,” you can hear her say while laughing in the video.
Florida Highway Patrol troopers arrested the driver, Jeffrey White, 33, of Tampa and charged him with leaving the scene of a crash.
“He kept spinning his wheels but couldn’t get out,” Florida Driver said.
She added that one of White’s friends came with a tow chain to get him out and that he fled before law enforcement officers arrived.
The video shows he took out a light pole owned by the Florida Department of Transportation and caused extensive damage to the grassy median.
As he drove off, Florida Driver said she drove up and took a picture of his tag.
She gave that picture to police and they arrested him Wednesday.
White has since bonded out. No one answered the door at White’s home.
Florida Driver said she was not ready for this video to go viral. She only put it online to show coworkers, she said. Now she has received more than 5,000 messages in her YouTube inbox about it.
