A Trucker’s Tale

As you know if you have read the prior blogs, my husband is a truck driver.  They are like fishermen, they sure can tell the the stories.  I am going to share one today.

I believe it was in the mid to late 80’s when people were doing the thing of throwing/dropping things off the overpass.  They dropped rocks, pop bottles, cans and various items on to the highway.  They thought it was fun if they were able to achieve their goal of striking cars and trucks with the items.  This was a terrible thing to do and many accidents and tragedies occurred.  My husband witnessed one such event.

He was on his way to Chicago on Interstate 57 North passing through Kankakee.  He heard on the CB radio that at the railroad overpass people were throwing stuff off. He started paying closer attention to the radio because he was approaching that overpass.  They were dropping cinder blocks. Instead of dropping the blocks and taking a chance on missing a vehicle, they came up with an idea.  Turns out it was a very stupid idea, but at the time, they thought it was a great idea.

They attached a rope through the hole in the cinder block and tied it up and then wrapped the other end of the rope around their arm so that they could just drop the block down and dangle it over the bridge.  This made it so that when a truck came under, the block would then break out the windshield.

Well, mission accomplished.  Their idea unfortunately worked.  The truck came along and the block did in fact break out the windshield.  They did not expect this, but the block went through the windshield and inside of the cab of the truck.  The bad thing is that since the rope was wrapped around the arm, with the force of the impact and the speed of the truck, it ripped the arm right off.

By the time my husband went through there, the ambulance had already left with the injured person. Traffic had, of course, come to a stop.  My husband was out of the truck waiting and saw the police handcuffing the truck driver.  This was a terrible thing that happened.  However, my husband was puzzled as to why they were taking the truck driver away.  What else happened to cause this?  What did the truck driver do to be at fault?

My husband went up and asked one of the policeman what happened, as he thought  obviously the people throwing things  were at fault.  He asked if the driver had done something.  It was confusing because it seemed as if they were arresting the victim. Therefore, he just had to ask why they were arresting him because this made no sense at all.  The policeman turned to my husband and said they were arresting the truck driver for…..

ARMED ROBBERY!!!!!

Haha.  I am sorry, just had to do this.  My husband tells this story over and over to people and they always swallow it….hook, line and sinker.  Even though it sounds terrible at one part, it always makes them laugh when they realize how gullible they have been.   I hope it made you laugh too!