Karen Gets KNOCKED OUT COLD in BRUTAL INSTANT KARMA!

He Picked the Wrong Car, and Not for the Reason You Think There is a video of me being screamed at by a man in a pickup truck for four and a half minutes. It has been in a lot of compilations under titles about road ragers messing with the wrong person. People watch it expecting the part where I get out, or where I say something devastating, or where he gets what is coming to him. None of that happens. I sit there. I keep my hands visible. I do not look at him, I do not speak to him, and I do not react in any way for four and a half minutes, and then he leaves, and that is the entire video. He did pick the wrong car. Just not for the reason the title suggests. There was a sixteen year old girl in my passenger seat on her fourth driving lesson, and there was a fifty one year old woman behind the wheel who has spent fourteen years teaching people exactly what to do in that situation, and who learned it the worst way there is. My name is Corinna Ballard, everyone calls me Cory, and I teach defensive driving. Before that I drove a city bus for eleven years. That detail matters and I will come back to it, because it is the reason I am able to sit still while a man calls me things through a window six inches from my face. The lesson that day was ordinary. Neve Attaway was sixteen, she was on her fourth session, and we were doing lane changes on a divided road because that is what session four is. She was doing well. She was tense in the shoulders the way they all are, and she was checking her mirrors twice, which is a habit I would rather over correct later than install badly now. We were in my training car, which is marked. There is a sign on the roof. Everyone knows what it means, which is that the person driving is new and everyone else should be a little patient for about eleven seconds. Most people are. That is the thing nobody says in these articles. In fourteen years of putting brand new drivers on real roads, the overwhelming majority of people around us have been decent, and half of them wave. The truck came up behind us fast, and Neve was in the left lane finishing a pass, and she was going the speed limit, and she had about four more seconds before she was clear to move over. He did not have four seconds available. He came up onto us close enough that she lost the tailgate out of her mirror, then went around us on the right, and cut back in front, and then he brake checked her. Which is a thing that a person does to make you understand that something is going to happen. Neve did exactly the right thing without being told, which is she came off the accelerator and made space. I have never been prouder of a student in my life and I did not tell her that for about a week because there were other things to say first. He stopped in the lane. Then he got out. Here is where the video that everybody has seen begins, and here is where I want to walk you through what was going on in my head, because that is the only useful thing I have to offer. The first thing I did was lock the doors and put my hands flat on the top of the steering wheel where he could see them. The second thing I did was tell Neve, in a completely flat voice, to look straight ahead and put her phone on her lap and not make eye contact and not say anything at all, no matter what she heard. She did most of that. She did not put the phone down, which turned out to matter later. The third thing I did was nothing. For four and a half minutes. He was at my window. He was hitting the glass with the flat of his hand. He was calling me a list of things and then calling her a list of things, and she was sixteen, and I want to be clear that the hardest thing I have ever done with my hands on a steering wheel was not respond to the part where he started on her. Because here is the actual mechanic of these encounters, and it is the only thing I teach that I would call a rule rather than a guideline. A road rage confrontation requires two participants. Not two angry people. Two participants. One person can be as furious as they want and it will not become an incident unless somebody engages, and engagement includes a look, a hand gesture, a mouthed word, and rolling a window down two inches to explain yourself. The explanation is the one that gets people. Everybody wants to explain. Everybody has a completely reasonable sentence in their mouth about how they were signaling, and that sentence feels like de-escalation and it is not, it is participation, and it extends the encounter by an average of a very long time. So you give them nothing. Nothing to react to, nothing to escalate against, no feedback of any kind. A person yelling at a car that will not respond runs out of fuel in a way that is almost boring to watch, and I have watched it maybe nine times now. Four and a half minutes is a long time. It is genuinely a long time. But he ran out, the way they run out, and he went back to his truck and left, and I sat there for another two minutes before I trusted my hands. Then I drove us to a police station rather than to her house, which is the other rule, and I called it in from the parking lot, and I made Neve call her mother while I sat in the car with her. Now the part the video does not have. I recognized him. Not immediately. It took until about minute three, when he stepped back from the window and I got a full look at his face, and something in the back of my head produced a name that I did not fully believe for a couple of days. Bo Lachlan. I taught him to drive when he was sixteen years old. He was one of my students, probably a decade earlier. Sullen kid, decent hands, terrible at parallel parking, funny in a dry way once he decided you were alright. I remembered him being kind about a stalled car we passed, which is a strange detail to keep for ten years. He did not recognize me. He was too far into it. That is not a metaphor, it is just what happens to people in that state. I sat with that for a long time. I still do. The idea that I had a hand in the driver he became, or that I did not, and that either way I taught him the exact protocol he was violating at my window while a sixteen year old sat frozen beside me. Now the other thing I have not told you, which is why I am able to do any of this. In 2009 I was driving a city bus, route 14, and a man in a sedan cut me off at a merge and I leaned on the horn and held it. That is all I did. I want you to notice how small it was. He responded. I responded to his response. This went on for about six blocks, and at a light he got out and came to the door of the bus and I opened it, because in my head I was going to sort this out, and because I had thirty one passengers and I was not going to be intimidated in front of them. I do not know how to write the next part without it sounding like an excuse for something. A woman named Marlene who was seventy three years old and sat in the second row got knocked down in what followed. She broke a hip. She was in hospital for eleven days and she never fully got back to where she had been. She did not blame me. She told the investigator that I had been provoked, and she wrote a letter saying so, and she asked after me for years afterward through a mutual friend. I have never been able to accept any of that, because I was the professional in the situation, and I had a vehicle full of people who had not chosen to be part of anything, and I opened the door. I left the transit authority a year later. Not because I was pushed out. Because I could not get back in that seat without doing the math about who was behind me. That is what I teach now. All of it comes from that. Everything I say about not engaging comes from one afternoon on route 14 and a woman named Marlene in the second row, and everybody who takes my class gets told about it in week one. So when a man was at my window screaming and there was a sixteen year old in my passenger seat, I was not being calm. I was not being brave, and I was not, whatever the comments say, being some kind of unbothered stoic. I was being obedient to a rule I wrote after I got it catastrophically wrong. Now. The video. Neve had her phone up for most of it, filming down at her lap, which is why the angle is strange. She posted it that night. She was sixteen and she had just had the worst four minutes of her young life and she did the thing that her entire generation does with an experience, and I do not blame her. It did about two million views in a week and then it went into the compilations, and the framing was that he had picked the wrong person, and people in the comments decided I was some kind of hardened ex military operator based on the fact that I did not move. Somebody identified him. Of course they did. That takes about a day and a half now. He lost his job. His employer had a policy about conduct and a video with two million views is not a thing an employer can be seen to ignore, and I understand exactly why they did what they did. And I want to be careful with the next paragraph, because I have written it about nine times. What he did was serious. He terrorized a child. He was inches from a sixteen year old girl calling her things I will not put in this article, and there is a version of that afternoon where somebody got hurt, and the only reason there is not is that I had a very specific reason for keeping my hands on the wheel. He deserved consequences. He deserved to be reported, which he was, and he deserved what came from that. I do not think he deserved to be an anonymous villain in a two hour video for the rest of his life, watched by people who will never know his name and will never have to think about him again after the next clip starts. I asked Neve to take it down. That conversation took three weeks and it was the hardest teaching I have ever done, because she was right about a lot of it. Her position was that she had been frightened, that documenting it was the only power she had in that car, and that she should not have to protect a man who did that to her. All of that is true and I told her so. My position was that the video had stopped being about her safety about four hours after she posted it, and that what it was doing now was something else, something she had not chosen and could not steer. We compromised, eventually, and I think the compromise was better than either of our original positions. She took it down. I contacted him, through his attorney, and asked whether he would consent to a version being used in defensive driving instruction, faces obscured, no names, in classrooms. He said yes. He said yes within about a day. We have used it for two years now. It is the single most effective teaching tool I have ever had, because there is no music and no caption telling you how to feel and it goes on for four and a half minutes, which is exactly long enough for a room full of teenagers to stop finding it exciting and start finding it unbearable. I do not have a reconciliation story for you. Bo Lachlan and I have not spoken and I do not expect to. I hope he is alright. I am aware that some people will find that offensive. So here is the practical part, which is the only part of this that will ever do anybody any good. If somebody comes at your car, lock the doors and put your hands where they can be seen. Do not make eye contact, do not gesture, and do not explain. Explaining is participation. Do not get out. There is no version of getting out that improves your situation, including the version where you are completely right, and especially the version where you are completely right. If you are moving, do not go home. Drive to a police station, a fire station, or a busy well lit business, and call 911 while you are still in the car with the doors locked. And if you have a passenger, say out loud what you are doing and why, in a flat voice, because a frightened person in the seat next to you needs to hear that somebody in the car has a plan even if the plan is to sit completely still. The clip is below, in the version people saw before it came down, or one of the copies of it, since there is no such thing as taking something down. Watch it, and notice that nothing happens. That is the whole lesson. Nothing happening is what winning looks like, and it does not make a very good thumbnail.     Full Video