Seeking advice–road rage incident….

Some of you may have seen me this morning near the cycletrack at 15th & I. The long and short of it is I had the crosswalk and was moving across the intersection northbound at a relatively slow pace. The first car tried turning right from 15th onto I street and of course was stopped per pedestrians (Vermont Avenue entrance to McPherson Square Metro is right there). That car finally made it through. I’m still proceeding (a few cars are going straight from 15th toward H) and a white escalade pulls right in front of me and then abruptly stops per realizing all the pedestrians crossing. I can’t go right without going into oncoming traffic so I slam my brakes. I successfully stop just short of the car but per a quick stop I slide off the front of my bike forward and end up stopping myself with my gloved hand against the guy’s escalade. I’m happy I didn’t hit him and so I stop for a second, remount and continue along the cycletrack north.

About 30 feet later I find myself planted into the ground bike strewn around my legs and this guy is screaming you ‘fn ahole, you touched my car’. I’m now dazed and trying to assess what is going on. While part of me wanted to get up and coldclock the guy, I looked to my left saw two DC police cars stopped. I stayed on the ground as this guy kept ranting and as the guy kept screaming, I finally responded get off me, I didn’t touch your car. The cops came over and then began the ordeal of filing a report, sort of.

The cops asked us both what happened and then proceeded to check his vehicle for damage and ask me if I’m alright. I explained my knee was a little scraped up per the crazy guy tackling me into the ground, but I’m fine. Low and behold they find no damage on the road rage crazy guy’s car and then can see a brief imprint where my hand touched it. So the cops start explaining to me that technically touching his car could be considered a collision and not trying to talk to him to notify him that I touched his car could be considered a hit and run therefore he could be theoretically seen as trying to detain me until the police arrived. They said alternatively it could also be seen as assault. I pointed out that they were parked literally 20 feet away on the other side of 15, the guy didn’t call out anything, and he told the cops he tackled me. I explained that the complete stop meant sliding off my bike meaning I did not only come to a complete stop, but I had a good 5-10 seconds the guy could have said something right then and there. I sensed the cops didn’t want to fill out any paperwork and so when the first cop started saying he could technically haul both of us to jail (me for alledging hitting and running and him for flat out tackling me) is when I pulled out my phone and started typing in the cops names and badge numbers. I used to work in a legislative capacity and I knew full well that they can’t just arrest you because someone claims you hit their car.

Moving along, crazy guy continues to try explaining that I hit his car and evidently above the wheel well. One cop points out that my bike isn’t even tall enough to reach that spot. The other cops said there is no discernible damage at all. Meanwhile the one cop chats with me and he’s actually friendly. He basically says shit happens, the guy had no business tackling me, it’s clear there was no accident and he would’ve told the guy to apologize to me and then asked me what I wanted to do. Meanwhile the not-so-nice cop comes back and asks if I plan to file assault charges. I said I’m not sure, but I don’t have to do it right now, correct? Same cop says he’s going to call an ambulance and has a dialogue with his partner. His partner says then we got to file all of this paperwork and he says well he says his knee is scraped and you know where this could lead us too. (No ambulance ever comes). Anyway, this whole process takes up about 40 minutes. The cops end up filing a 1050 report (accident I suspect) citing no damage to his car. They take photos of both of us, take all of our license details down (and crazy guy’s insurance), and give me a piece of paper with the filing officer’s contact information, phone number, a report number, and the approximate time and location. The cop explains that this will go to the US District Attorney’s Office and they may followup with charges or they may just leave it as a report. Evidently I can pickup the actual report in a week or two at their station on V Street.

The good news is that my knee is a little scratches as is my hand, but I didn’t notice any major injuries from the tackling. I didn’t ride my bike yet again so I don’t know if it’s damage, but it only looks like it has some scratches from where it hit the cycletrack as the guy tackled me. Now the question is what do I do? Part of me thinks I should file assault charges because in a previous line of work (legislative work with judicial sector) I learned that often people’s responses escalate…first you tackle someone, then you run them over, etc. Another part of me thinks chalk up to bad luck running across that road rage dbag. Another part of me thinks it’s absolutely ridiculous that the one cop tried coercing me into doing nothing simply to avoid paperwork. So I’m curious about everyone else’s advice.

And for what it’s worth, I wish I had a printed copy of that ‘what to do’ report. Granted mine wasn’t an accident, a lot of things sounded similar.