By Henry Luzzatto

Correspondent

On Friday morning, I witnessed the least competent criminal I have ever seen.

No, I’m not talking about Hillary Clinton. That joke’s too easy to make.

Instead, I’m talking about a perpetrator in a car accident on Godwin Boulevard.

The accident itself was not particularly unusual. One man in a gray Ford Taurus got sideswiped by someone else in a blue pickup truck. The wheel of the truck flew off and into the ditch. No one was injured.

Despite my unfortunately close proximity to it, it was pretty mundane as far as accidents go.

But then it got weird.

I got out of my car to check on the people involved. The man driving the Taurus was fine. He was shaken up and his car was ruined, and he chain-smoked while calling the police, but he was uninjured. The other person was a pudgy, short man covered in tattoos, wearing a hat and athletic sunglasses. I like to imagine that he had frosted blond tips underneath his hat, because I assume he’s some sort of evil incarnation of Guy Fieri.

Evil Guy Fieri was talking to the drivers that come by. This is not uncommon, I think, especially if he’s asking them to call for police or an ambulance. It was when he attempted to open the car door and hop in that I thought something is up.

He attempted to hijack the passenger seat of three or four vehicles before I realized he was attempting to get away.

I’m really not sure what his end game here was. Did he honestly believe he could attempt to flee the scene in someone else’s car like Matt Damon in an action movie? Did he think someone would just decide to assist in a hit and run? Maybe they would think, “Hmm, my life’s been pretty normal; how about I start aiding and abetting a fugitive of the law?”

This plan was obviously not succeeding, and was instead gaining a lot of attention, even more than he originally had from, you know, hitting a car.

He then went with Plan B, which was escaping on foot. This plan had some obvious flaws, seeing that he was forced to abandon his car, which was attached to his license plate. I get the feeling that someone who attempts to flee the scene of an accident on foot has already had an experience or two with police, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the police were already familiar with those plates.

This man was not fast. Despite the fact that he was wearing basketball shorts and athletic sunglasses, nothing about this person gave the impression that he was an athlete.

He ran off into a neighborhood to the left of the accident, perhaps hoping that if he couldn’t be immediately located, he would not have to face any punishment. Unfortunately for him, he ran off in the direction of the Western Tidewater Regional Jail.

Maybe he wanted to turn himself in. Or maybe he just had a great sense of irony.

As he attempted to flee into the underbrush like an animal, other onlookers and I caught blurry pictures of him.

As I took a photo, he turned back to look at us, leaving me with a result that looked eerily like the famous photo of Bigfoot running away.

CrashSquatch disappeared, and the police arrived to sort out the scene.

After giving a statement to police and sharing the picture I took, I drove off. After a second of driving, I felt a twinge of regret, as I forgot to take a look at the truck driver’s bumper stickers, which may have given me a glimpse into the mind of our doomed protagonist.

Though I doubt it, I kind of like to think that one of the stickers was a “COEXIST” emblem. After all, the guy did have a great mind for irony.

Henry Luzzatto is a Suffolk resident and an intern at the Suffolk News-Herald. Email him at henry.luzzatto@gmail.com.