Terrifying Video Shows SUV Speeding Along Texas Highway Towing Car Backwards By a Chain as It Careens Wildly
“What are you doing, stupid?!”
A Houston man spoke for everyone when he yelled that phrase as he watched in shock as an SUV towing a backwards-facing car careened down the highway. Luckily for us, it was caught on video. Even more luckily for the people in the SUV and towed car, they miraculously avoided serious injury.
Video clips were posted on social media showing a white SUV towing a dark blue sedan with a black cloth convertible top by a chain along Houston’s North Loop — the section of I-610 curves around the north side of the city between US 290 and US 90.
David Chairez was one of several locals who captured the terrifying incident on cell phone video as he rode along with his coworker. The two generator deliverymen had just merged onto the North Loop from 290 when they saw the wildly unsafe towing setup.
In the video, Chairez and his coworker can be heard yelling in disbelief at the SUV driving at highway speed and the car zig-zagging back and forth across lanes and other drivers swerve to stay out of its path. The SUV began merging right and the car continued careening wildly along the concrete barrier wall.
“Girl! Don’t do that!” they called out, their voices alternating between nervous laughter and panicked yells. “Oh, sh*t!”
“Stop! Don’t try to f*cking go!”
“She’s going to hit that door!”
“What are you doing, stupid?!”
As they got closer to the chaos, they rolled down the passenger side window and squealing brakes could be heard and smoke rising from the road under the blue sedan’s tires. The side mirror was dangling by the wire, apparently from striking something.
Adding to the peril: there was someone in the driver’s seat in that backwards-facing car being flung back and forth.
“It looked like a scene from Fast & Furious,” Chairez told reporters with ABC13 Houston afterwards. “That was very reckless, and that was very dangerous.”
The SUV did eventually manage to pull over and both the woman driving the SUV and man in the car she was towing were unharmed.
Police told ABC13 that the problems started when 32-year-old Dontae Brown’s car broke down and he called his girlfriend, but neither had the money for a proper tow truck and they unwisely decided to attempt it themselves with a chain.
The couple’s scheme turned out to be more MacGruber than MacGyver, and the sedan’s axle ended up breaking off, resulting in a loss of control.
Fox 26 Houston had additional video of the incident, and others were posted on social media Tuesday.
KHOU 11 interviewed Ken Collins, an eyewitness who saw the two cars come to a stop along the I-610 feeder road.
“It was crazy, I thought they was [about to] fight, I thought he was going to jump on the driver.He was yelling at the lady, he hit his hood,” Collins said.
He said the conflict continued.
“She was trying to talk to him, but he didn’t want to hear nothing of it. He was like, ‘you messed up my car, you [messed] up my car,'” he said.
After seeing the videos, Collins is concerned about what happened.
“I don’t know whose idea it was to pull the car from the back like that. Normally, on a chain you pull a car from the front but that’s my only thought. Why did they pull it from the back, especially on the freeway?” Collins said.
Brown was arrested for an active warrant he had from Georgia, but somehow no citations were issued for this escapade — perhaps because the couple luckily avoided causing injury or damage to cars besides their own.
Watch the video clips above via ABC13 and Fox 26.
