At about 8:35 pm the day after Thanksgiving (Friday, November 25th, 2005), my wife and I were in our Honda Passport on a five-lane road in Southern California. There were two lanes in each direction and one in the middle which can be used by either direction for making left turns. We were in the left lane of our direction's two lanes. The road ahead was empty ahead. The closest car was a few hundred feet behind us in the lane to our right.
Suddenly, a car comes flying around an "S" curve 500 to 600 feet ahead. The oncoming driver had crossed not just our lane but most of the way into the lane to our right, too. It's a long way ahead, but it's very strange.
What would you do?
Here's what I did: I immediately braked fairly hard. It's one of several maneuvers over the next five to seven seconds which saved our lives. I alerted my wife to the erratic driver ahead. I said, "Look at this guy!"
He straightened out -- but didn't go back to his side. Instead, he straightened out in MY lane, coming right at us -- and he was ACCELERATING!
I am going very slowly now, under 25 miles an hour. I slide towards the right lane to give him room.
So what does the other driver do? He turns to his LEFT -- "tracking" our car precisely -- still aiming for us! And, he is STILL accelerating.
He's got some real speed now. I expect to see a line of cop cars chasing him or something next. He's in a terrible hurry.
There is a curb on the right side of the road. Our wonderful California Driver's Manual says not to box yourself in if at all possible during emergency situations, and this is clearly a very dire situation. So I move back to my original lane, where I have more options available.
Sure enough, the other driver tracks this maneuver as well.
So I stop maneuvering and slow down even more. Neither driver is turning at all anymore. He continues to accelerate.
I say something like "Oh, Geez." I think about air bags and whether they can save us at these closing speeds. I conclude that they cannot.
The gap between us is closing rapidly. We had started this last straight-away 250 to 300 feet apart. (For reference, a vehicle covers 88 feet in one second at 60 miles per hour.)
What happened next? I waited, because I could clearly see that the other driver was getting a huge head of steam up -- he had the "pedal to the metal" as the saying goes. All the time, this was reducing HIS maneuverability.
In the final fraction of a second, at the last possible moment, when it was clear that there was no avoidance maneuver the other driver could make which would save him from going through my "box," and when he had NO chance to track my sudden maneuver, I finally gunned the motor, let out the clutch, turned hard to my LEFT, and accelerated and turned as hard and as tight as possible. (Michelin radial tires.)
After turning hard to the left, I turned hard right, in order to prevent getting t-boned as the other driver CONTINUED TO TURN TOWARDS US. He was trying until the very end to have a high-speed head-on collision.
As we passed I could see he was turning the steering wheel to his right -- towards us. His fatal intent was absolute, but I THOUGHT we had completely avoided him.
My wife also thought we had avoided the accident at the moment he passed us. But alas, the other driver managed to clip our tail. BANG! What a noise! An accident at 60 to 80 miles an hour is surprisingly violent, even if you yourself are barely going 15 miles per hour.
I brought the car to a stop. The other driver skidded around a bit, but then quickly drove off wildly.
However, he left a piece of his car in the road, and I have it. It has a sticker on it which has a variety of pieces of information which can undoubtedly be used to positively identify the other car.
We immediately called 911.
I forget exactly how the 911 operator phrased the question of whether I could recognize the other driver, but by the following Monday, I was going to tell the police that IF they could find the guy based on the car part I had recovered, I could probably pick him out of a line-up.
But instead, I saw him on television that morning. I believe the other driver was Randy "Duke" Cunningham -- my Congressman. The Congressman who, the following Monday (November 28th, 2005), confessed to taking over $2,000,000 in bribes and tearfully resigned. I think he was trying to get out of Monday's duties.
Whoever came at our car that night did so with deadly precision and unwavering suicidal intent. However, the driver made a serious tactical error by thinking I had resigned myself to his plan, and by getting TOO MUCH SPEED to match my final maneuver. In other words, it appears that a Phantom Jet Ace and Top Gun Instructor lost the "dogfight" to the hippie mountain-biker activist and computer geek. And the world got a cooperative Federal witness instead of three dead bodies and a lot of questions that could never be answered.
But was it really him?
I have made a statement to the California Department of Motor Vehicles that I believe the other driver was Randy Cunningham, and that in light of his willingness to testify on other matters of great national interest, I have no interest in seeing him prosecuted for leaving the scene of an accident, for failure to properly yield the right-of-way, for assault with a deadly weapon, for attempted murder of two of his constituents, for gross recklessness, or for behavior unbecoming of a Congressman (or anybody). I'll happily let it all go if he'll continue to testify in the bribery scandal and put the even bigger creeps in prison.
But if by some chance it WASN'T Randall Cunningham I saw in that other car, we all need the real guy caught. But I can't get the cops to investigate this. Personally, of course, I suspect the reason is because the other driver WAS Randy Cunningham and the cops already suspect it, and they are already throwing the book at him and this is just a distraction to them (and to him).
But maybe the cops just don't care. Maybe they think it was just "some drunk," which is one of the suggestions the responding San Marcos sheriff implied, along with the idea that the other driver probably didn't have any insurance.
Possibly, but I believe it was then-Congressman Randall "Duke" Cunningham, and I have informed Cunningham's lawyer that I feel that way (and that I forgive him because he's cooperating in those other investigations). I haven't heard anything back.
Russell Hoffman
Concerned Citizen
Carlsbad, CA
Pertinent details: The accident occurred November 25th, 2005 at about 8:35 pm on Mission Road in San Marcos, CA. If you Google Local "Sorrento's Pizza San Marcos, CA" it points to the exact location of the accident. If you have ANY information about this accident, please contact the San Marcos Sheriff's department: (760) 510-5200. The San Marcos Sheriff's Department Incident Number is 4798702.