Chris Barnes, a comedian from Queens, New York, shared how his SUV was wrecked in an attempted hit and run. In a pair of videos on TikTok, he reveals footage of a red Isuzu Rodeo reversing straight into the side of his parked car, which was smashed against a telephone pole. In a panic, the female driver of the Isuzu got out of the car and fled on foot, while a man in the passenger seat hopped into the driver’s seat and raced away. Both thought they would get away with it, but it didn’t take long for Barnes to track the vehicle down.
Man thought it would take hours to find the car that wrecked his SUV
The comedian explains that, while he was away from his apartment, he received a frantic call from his roommate telling him that his silver SUV was totaled. Fortunately, a neighbor was able to grab footage of the incident from her camera, and that’s when he realized what happened.
Allegedly, the driver was a teenage girl who was being taught how to drive from her father. She performed all the motions of a typical driver’s ed student, like checking the mirrors and cautiously looking backward before pulling out. But once the girl began driving, the vehicle moved backward and, instead of braking, it continued to accelerate into Barnes’ car with such impact that it lifted off the ground for a second.
However, instead of waiting to find the owner of the smashed SUV, the startled teenager gets out of the car and flees the scene on foot, while the father zooms away with the vehicle.
When the comedian returned to see the damage to his car, which includes a heavily dented door and broken windows, he originally thought about getting revenge by ramming their car back. As he says in a follow-up video, he thought it would take hours to find the Isuzu, thinking that anyone who wanted to get away with a hit and run would park their car miles away. But he found the vehicle almost immediately.
“These idiots parked their car not even a block away from my apartment,” he says. “I mean, not even a block. It took me literal seconds to find their car.”
And it wasn’t difficult to know that it was the right car because it “still had glass from my car on its bumper.”
Instead of going through his initial plan, Barnes decided not to confront the father-daughter pair and took a picture of the license plate and sent it along with other evidence to his insurance company. Barnes believed that the company could punish them more than he could himself.
While his insurance company allegedly only wanted to give him a few thousand dollars to repair his SUV, he harried the agent enough times by email that he got $20,000 instead, which was more than what he paid for the vehicle. So in the end, the incident actually made him several thousand dollars for his trouble.
