‘This is how I drive in GTA’: Man becomes so irate his car has been towed he hijacks tow truck and plows through downtown Brooklyn

When Prometheus bestowed the knowledge of fire upon humankind, he was promptly tied to a rock, and an eagle came by every day to eat his liver, which always grew back over night. And yet, whoever decided it would be a good idea for us to have both tow trucks and free will, seems to have gotten off scot-free.

Indeed, there’s something fishy in the Olympus judicial system, because while fire can create its fair share of bedlam, the combination of tow trucks and free will is legendary in its capacity for destruction and insanity. The event you’re about to see here was forged in the depths of chaos itself before it was brought to a deep broil in the stew of indignance and anxiety that our nation has tragically become.

The incident was documented by three different TikTokers, with the video you see above coming courtesy of @repodaddy82caddy, the driver who brought the tow truck into this mayhem-coated equation of ours. As he prepared to tow the misaligned vehicle away from its area of static mischief, the owner of the vehicle caught wind of the situation, and stepped up to defend the honor of his shoddy parking job by threatening the tow truck driver with a beating, as captured in the video below by @bomana303.

By now, you’ve seen the cataclysmic fruits of this man’s unbridled rage; a hijacked tow truck, countless cars mangled by the improperly-attached vehicle, a right turn that sent the vehicle flying, the sense that this man didn’t exactly think this plan of asset-preservation through. He eventually gets out of the tow truck and flees, but TMZ reports that the man, 55-year-old Russell Laiosa, was ultimately found and arrested by the cops. He was charged with one count of grand theft auto, two counts of reckless endangerment, and 11 counts of property damage and leaving the scene of an accident (captured in exhilarating definition by @iamtheceo below).

Now, according to the official website of the New York Police Department, the regular fee for springing a towed vehicle from the tow pound is $185, while freeing a heavy duty vehicle will run you $370. Both of those fees are, presumably, far less money than what Russell has come face-to-face with in the fallout of his precedent-setting road rage, but if it were possible to convert spontaneous adrenaline into currency, he’d be the richest man on Earth.

New York may never be the same from one day to the next, but this feels like a very particular point of no return; the post-Russell era, where tow trucks need to be registered as both vehicles and weapons, and where therapists are mandated to travel with tow truckers at all times, because you just never know.