Best Of Motorcycle Road Rage Got Instant Karma | Motorcycle Crashes
He Screamed at Me, Then He Crashed. I Was the One Who Got to Him First.
There is a clip of me in one of those compilations. I am the woman in the silver station wagon at around the eleven minute mark, and a man on a sport bike is at my window screaming at me, and then he pulls away and eight seconds later he goes down hard at the intersection. The caption calls it instant karma. There is a laughing emoji in the corner.
I am the person who reached him first. I want to tell you about the eight seconds in between, because I have thought about almost nothing else for two years, and because I think most people watching those videos have never had to find out what they would actually do.
My name is Ilene, everyone calls me Leni, I am thirty nine years old and I coach a youth swim team. That is the entire extent of my qualifications for anything that happened that afternoon.
It started the way all of them start, which is to say stupidly. I changed lanes on a four lane road and I did not see him. That is the honest version. I have watched my own dashcam footage frame by frame and there is a moment where he is in my mirror and I do not register him, and then I move over, and he has to brake hard.
I was wrong. I have said that from the first day and I have never wavered on it, and it matters to me that it goes at the top of this rather than buried in the middle where people put the parts they hope you skim.
He caught me at the light. He came up on my passenger side, then cut around to my window, and he took his helmet off, which I later learned is a thing riders do when they want you to see their face.
And then he screamed at me for probably forty seconds. Not a sentence, not an argument, just volume. He called me things. He hit the roof of my car twice with an open hand. My hands were at ten and two and I was staring straight forward and I was doing the thing where you make yourself very small and very still.
I was frightened, and underneath the fear I was furious, and I want to be honest about the shape of that fury because it is the whole reason this story matters. I did not want him to be reasoned with. I wanted something to happen to him. I wanted him to get what was coming.
I had my phone up. I want to be very clear that I was not filming for safety, or for evidence, or for any of the noble reasons people give. I was filming because I was angry and I wanted proof of what he looked like so that other people could be angry at him too. I was already composing the caption.
The light changed. He put his helmet back on and pulled away hard, front wheel light, the way they do when the last word is a throttle.
Eight seconds later he went down at the next intersection.
I am not going to describe it. He went down at speed and it was not survivable-looking and my whole body understood that before my brain did.
Here is what I need you to understand about that moment, and it is the reason I agreed to write this. For approximately one second, maybe less, there was a feeling in me that I have not been able to fully name and have never fully forgiven. It was not joy. It was something like arrival. A door closing. The universe balancing an account.
And then I was out of the car running, and I have no memory at all of unbuckling my seatbelt or opening the door.
There were maybe nine other people at that intersection. Four of them had phones up before I got to him. I do not say that to condemn them and I am not sure I am entitled to, since I had been the one with a phone up ninety seconds earlier.
He was breathing when I got there. I know that because I put my face near his and I could hear it, and that sound is the reason I did the next several things right instead of falling apart.
I coach swimming, which means I recertify in CPR and basic first aid every two years whether I feel like it or not. Twelve years of doing a class I resented on a Saturday morning, and I have never once used it at a pool, and I used every second of it on a road that afternoon.
I did not take his helmet off. That is the one thing I knew for certain and it turned out to be the most important decision anybody made in the first five minutes. A man who arrived after me was reaching for it, meaning to help, and I said no in a voice I did not recognize and he stopped.
Someone called 911. I know somebody did because I could hear a woman giving the cross streets in the flat repeating way people talk to dispatchers. I stayed where I was, and I talked to him, and I have no idea whether he could hear me.
I told him his name was going to be fine, which is not a sentence, but I did not know his name and I needed to say something. I told him people were coming. I told him to keep breathing. At some point I was holding his hand, or he was holding mine, and I could not tell you which of us started it.
The ambulance took eleven minutes. I know that number precisely because it is in a report I was later shown, and because at the time it felt like a day and a half.
His name is Sawyer Kimbro and he was twenty seven years old.
He lived. He was in the hospital for a long time and there are things he does differently now and always will, and I am not going to inventory them because they are his and he has been more generous with me than I deserve already.
I sat in a hospital hallway that night for four hours with his mother Ruthie, who I had never met, and who did not know that the woman sitting with her was the driver he had been screaming at. Nobody had told her. I could not work out how to say it and so I did not say it, and I have thought about that a great deal too.
She found out three days later. She came and found me in the cafeteria and I stood up because I assumed she was going to tell me to leave.
She hugged me. She said her son had told her what he did at my window, in detail, unprompted, from a hospital bed, and that he had made her promise to say thank you to me before he could say it himself.
The video went up that same week.
Someone at that intersection posted it. Then it went into the compilations, and within a month it was in at least six of them, always under some version of the same title. Motorcycle road rage instant karma. Sometimes with a countdown timer. Sometimes with an air horn sound effect at the moment of the crash.
In every single version of that video, the clip cuts about two seconds after he goes down.
Which means that in every single version, I am the angry woman in the station wagon, and that is the entirety of my role. The compilations do not show me running. They do not show eleven minutes on the asphalt. They cut before any of it, because what comes after is not the product.
I have never seen a version that includes it. Not one. And I have looked, more than is healthy.
Here is the part that undid me, and it is the reason I stopped being able to leave this alone.
My own footage cleared him.
Not of the road rage. He did that, it is on camera, and he has never denied a second of it. What my dashcam caught was the intersection itself, from an angle nobody else had, and what it showed was a car coming through a turn against a signal in front of him.
He was riding aggressively. He was going too fast for the situation because he was angry, at me, because of what I had done with my lane change. All of that is true and he has said so publicly.
And he was not the proximate cause of that crash. Somebody else ran that light, and my angry little phone recording and my dashcam together were the only reason anyone could establish it, and it materially changed both a criminal question and an insurance question in his favor.
I recorded that footage for revenge. I want that stated plainly. I hit record because I wanted a stranger punished by an audience. And that same recording is the thing that kept the wrong outcome from landing on him.
I have never decided what to do with that fact. I have turned it over for two years and it has never resolved into a lesson I feel entitled to teach anybody.
Sawyer and I talk maybe four times a year. He got engaged last spring to a woman named Etta who was extremely wary of me for the first year, which I understood completely, and who now sends me photographs of their dog.
He does not ride anymore. That was not a moral decision, it was a medical one, and he has been open about the fact that he does not know what he would have chosen if the choice had been available.
The first real conversation we had, months after, he asked me why I stayed. Not why I called 911, which he understood, but why I was still there at minute nine holding onto a man who had put his hand on my roof.
I told him the truth, which is that I do not entirely know. I have circled it a lot since. The closest I can get is that the thing I felt in that one second before I started running scared me so badly that I have been running from it ever since, and everything I did after that was partly about not being the person who felt it.
That is not a heroic answer and I have stopped trying to find a better one.
What I will offer instead is the practical part, because I think it is worth more than my feelings.
If you are ever the first person to a motorcycle crash, do not remove the helmet. There are narrow exceptions that trained responders handle and you are almost certainly not in one of them. Call 911, give cross streets, and say the words motorcycle and unresponsive if applicable, because those two words change what gets dispatched.
Do not move them unless they are in immediate danger from traffic or fire. Do not give them water. If they are breathing, your entire job is to stay, keep them still, keep them talking if they can, and wait, and that is much harder and much more useful than it sounds.
And take the CPR class. The boring one, on a Saturday, in a room with a plastic torso and an instructor who is tired. I resented every one of those mornings for twelve years and I would take every one of them again for the eleven minutes they bought that day.
Here is the last thing, and then you can watch the clip.
Those compilations are built on a promise, and the promise is that you get to see somebody receive exactly what they deserve, in fifteen seconds, with no consequences to you. It is a very old and very human appetite and I am not above it. I was feeding it myself with my phone up at that window.
But I got to find out what is on the other side of that door, which almost nobody who watches these videos ever does. What is on the other side is a twenty seven year old on the asphalt, and his mother in a hallway, and a woman with a first aid card in her wallet finding out what she is actually made of.
The instant karma lasts about one second. Everything after it lasts years.
The clip is below, in the version everybody saw. Watch it, and then watch where it cuts, and know that the reason it cuts there is that the next eleven minutes would have ruined the joke.
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