Not excusing it but understanding it.
NASSAU COUNTY, N.Y. (WKRC) — A retired man allegedly pinned a motorcyclist against a guardrail with his pickup truck.
According to The New York Post, 64-year-old Brian Noll of Scio, New York, was accused of deliberately swerving his 2022 Ford F-150 into a man riding a 2016 Kawasaki motorcycle at around 2:14 p.m. on Friday.
The victim, identified as 29-year-old Ibis Alex Baez of the Bronx, New York, was crushed against a metal guardrail and killed in the alleged road rage incident.
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The unidentified attorney alleged that Baez "took exception to something that my client did in his truck" and "positioned his vehicle, his motorcycle, alongside the truck and then took his hand off the throttle of the motorcycle and attempted to break off the mirror of the truck in a rage thereby causing the truck to lose control while he lost control of the motorcycle because he took his hand of the throttle," per the station.
F-150 driver accused of 'intentionally' crushing motorcyclist who allegedly caused 'havoc'
Unfortunately, bikers feel entitled to dispense immediate justice in the form of knocking down rear-view mirrors and/or inflicting other damages to vehicles that did something stupid to them, accidentally and otherwise. This has been going on for years and even has sprouted possibly hundreds of videos in Youtube and other platforms where you see nothing but bikers doing their vehicular vigilantism and I suspect many of them are just done for the clicks rather than a true sense of “self-defense”.
I can’t say if that is what truly happened in this case, but I would not be surprised if it did. But if it was, I am surprised it took this long for somebody to lose his mind and return the vigilante ways with interest to a biker.
Physic is to be ignored at your own peril.
I write this as someone who rode a motorcycle for a long time.
I don't condone it, but I understand it too.
It strikes me that the bikers-damaging-vehicles thing is in some ways similar to people who get off on being asses online, cyberbullies, SWATing, etc. They do it because they think they can get away with it, because they won't get caught. In the case of motorcyclists, they're so maneuverable and with such good acceleration, that some riders think they can move through traffic with impunity ... so same end state, can't get caught. Often they're right. (I've known bikers like that, and chose to not ride with them. Apart from being dangerous to be around, I found them to just generally not be pleasant people.)
Occasionally, they're not right, and they can't just wick the throttle and get away. Then they'd best pray the person they f*cked with is level headed enough to not want to wind up with a murder charge, because you know what? The bike's gonna lose. Period, full stop. Unless a whole pack of riders is going after a car, in which case the car might lose simply due to accumulated damage ... but there will be a lot of bikes down, too, if the driver's serious.
From a rider's standpoint a lot of car drivers are real pieces of work ... oblivious if not actively hostile. So I can't say the biker didn't have a grievance. What I can say, of course, is that it's better to let something go, than risk a confrontation you cannot win.
Why anyone from the Town of Scio, NY was in Nassau County, NY is kinda a head scratcher for me. Visiting family?
Scio is in the heart of Allegheny County, NY. A very Conservative, Constitutionalist, American flag waving area where the motto "God, Family, Country" is a valued way of life. My kinda territory. Exactly the opposite of Nassau County (99.5% of the residents there could not locate Allegheny County); it is the next County to the east of New York city.
Vast cultural difference.