Woman in Zebra Pajamas Crashes Into a Cop - Then Throws a Tantrum!

The Woman in the Zebra Pajamas. I Hooked Her Car, and I Know Why She Was Screaming.

I have been driving a tow truck for twenty three years and I have arrived at somewhere north of nine thousand crashes. I want you to understand what that means. I am not there for the impact. I am there for the ninety minutes afterward, which is a part of a car accident that almost nobody has ever seen and that television has never once gotten right.

I was the operator called to that intersection. The clip you have seen is about fifty seconds long. A woman in zebra print pajamas has rear ended a patrol vehicle at low speed, and she is out of her car in the road, and she is coming apart in a way that people found extremely funny.

The pajamas did most of the work. Take the pajamas out of that video and it is a woman crying at a crash scene, which is the most ordinary thing on earth and which nobody would have watched.

Her name is Charlene and she goes by Charlie, and she was forty one years old, and she had been awake for about four hours at that point, having gotten out of bed at three in the morning.

Here is what I saw when I got there, in the order I saw it.

A patrol vehicle with rear end damage that I would classify as cosmetic and annoying. A midsize sedan with a crumpled front and a leaking radiator, which is a tow. A deputy standing about ten feet from a woman who was screaming, with his hands relaxed at his sides, which told me he had already worked out that she was not a threat.

And then, when I walked around to hook the sedan, two car seats in the back.

Occupied.

That changes everything about a scene, and it changes it instantly, and the first thing I did was stop what I was doing and get eyes on both of them, because that is the job before the job.

They were fine. Both of them. A low speed rear end collision into a stationary vehicle, both properly restrained, and they were fine and would stay fine, and the deputy had already confirmed it before I arrived.

I want to be very clear that Charlie caused that crash. She was not paying attention and she hit a stopped police vehicle at an intersection, and there is no version of this article where that is somebody else's fault.

Now here is why she was screaming, and it is not what anybody in the comments guessed.

Charlie is a foster parent. She had been for six years.

At three in the morning, she had gotten the call. If you have never been around this system, that is how it works. A placement comes up, usually in the middle of the night, usually with almost no notice, and somebody has to say yes right then.

You do not shower. You do not get dressed. You put on shoes and you go, because a child is currently sitting in an office or a hospital or the back of a patrol car waiting to find out where they are sleeping, and every minute of that is a minute nobody gets back.

That is why she was in pajamas at seven in the morning. She had been in those pajamas since Monday night and it was now Tuesday, and she had been to an office, and to a pharmacy, and was on her way to a school district office to sort out enrollment, with two children in the back who had been in her house for four hours.

She had had roughly ninety minutes of sleep. That is not an excuse for hitting a stopped vehicle and I am not offering it as one. It is the reason it happened.

And the screaming, the thing everybody called a tantrum, was not about her car.

Charlie knew exactly what a traffic collision with foster children in the vehicle means, because she had been doing this for six years. It means a report. It means the agency is notified. It means an incident file exists now with her name on it and the words motor vehicle accident and minors in vehicle.

She was not throwing a tantrum. She was standing in a road watching a placement, and possibly her whole future as a foster parent, evaporate over a bent bumper.

I know all of this because she told the deputy while I was hooking her car, in a completely broken voice, and I was eleven feet away with my back to them, and I heard every word of it.

His name was Deputy Nils Bergstrom and I want to say something about how he handled it, because it was the best police work I have watched at a crash scene in twenty three years and it is entirely absent from the video.

He listened to the whole thing. He did not interrupt her, he did not tell her to calm down, which is the single least effective sentence in the English language, and he did not treat the screaming as a challenge to his authority.

Then he asked her one question, which was whether there was somebody who could come and sit with the children while we sorted the vehicles out. That is not a procedural question. That is a person recognizing that the actual emergency in front of him was not the bumper.

He wrote her a citation. He should have. She hit a stopped vehicle and the law is the law and I have no complaint about that at all.

What he also did was write his report with a level of detail that most people would not have bothered with. Speed, damage, restraint status of both children, the fact that they were uninjured and remained uninjured, the fact that the driver had been awake since three, the reason for that.

That report is the reason any of the rest of this ended the way it did, and he wrote it knowing it was a bent bumper on a Tuesday.

Someone at that intersection filmed it. Of course they did. I do not know who, and I have never been able to find out, and I have thought about that person more than I would like.

By that night it was up. Zebra pajamas woman crashes into cop and loses it. About two million views on the original and I have no idea how many across the reposts, because these things fragment immediately.

The comments were the comments. Nothing I could reproduce here would surprise you.

The children are in that video. They are not identifiable, and I have checked, and I want to say plainly that I am not going to describe them beyond what I already have, because they did not consent to being anywhere near any of this and they are the only people in the entire story who have done nothing at all.

Here is what happened over the next eleven weeks.

The agency did what it is required to do, which is review. Renée Dubois was the caseworker and by every account she was thorough and fair and did her job exactly as designed.

The problem is that a viral video is not a fact in a file. It is a pressure. It changes how a review feels to everyone in the room even when nobody says so out loud, and anybody who has been near an institution knows this is true.

The placement was disrupted. The two children were moved.

I am not going to tell you the video caused that, because I do not know, and because the honest answer is that a placement can disrupt for eleven reasons and the agency does not explain itself to tow truck drivers.

I am going to tell you that a woman who had said yes at three in the morning had those children for nine days.

Charlie stopped fostering after that. Not immediately. She did one more placement about five months later and then she stopped, and when I asked her why, she said something I have not been able to shake.

She said she could not do the three a.m. call anymore, because the entire thing runs on being willing to walk out your door as you are, at any hour, without thinking about it, and she could no longer stop thinking about it.

That is the actual cost of that video. Not embarrassment. Not a bad week. A foster home that was open for six years and is not open now, in a system that does not have enough of them, in a county where I know for a fact that children sleep in offices.

Now I have to tell you the part that makes this my story and not just something I witnessed.

I was one of those three a.m. children. In 1978, when I was seven.

I do not remember much about it and I am not going to perform a childhood for an audience. What I remember is the specific fact of being awake in a building with adults who were not related to me, and then a woman arriving in a coat over a nightgown, in the middle of the night, to take me to a house I had never seen.

I have thought about her my entire life. I have never known her name. She had me for six weeks and then something else happened and I went somewhere else, which was how it worked then.

What I know is that a person got out of bed and put a coat over a nightgown and drove to get a child she had never met, and did not consider for one second how she looked.

That is who Charlie was in those pajamas. And two million people looked at a woman who had gotten out of bed for somebody else's children and decided she was trash.

I told Charlie about 1978 about a year later, at a diner, because I had gotten her number off the paperwork which I am probably not supposed to do and I called her and asked if she wanted a coffee.

She cried and then I cried and then we ate eggs.

Here is what I would like people to take from this, and I am aware I am a tow truck driver and not anybody's teacher.

You are looking at fifty seconds. You do not know what hour that person got up, or why, or what they are about to lose. In twenty three years I have arrived at nine thousand of these and I can tell you that the amount of a human life that is visible from the outside of a car accident is close to zero.

The behavior that looks like a tantrum is almost never about the car. It is about the thing on the other side of the car. The shift they are now going to miss. The custody hearing. The one functioning vehicle in a household of four. The children in the back and what a report is going to do.

I have watched people apologize to me while their car was on a hook and their life was falling apart, and I have watched people scream at me over a paint scratch because the scratch was the last thing they could still control that day.

The pajamas are the tell. Not the joke.

Nobody in ordinary clothes at seven in the morning is interesting. A person still in what they slept in got up for something, and it was almost certainly not for themselves.

I do not know what happened to those two children. I have no right to that information and I have never sought it.

Charlie works at a garden center now. She is doing alright. She has a photograph on her refrigerator that she does not explain to visitors and that I did not ask about.

The clip is below. It has been up for four years and it will be up forever, and there is no mechanism anywhere to attach any of this to it.

Watch it if you want. Then look at the back seat, and count the car seats, and ask yourself what kind of person is out driving at that hour in the clothes they slept in.