Speaker 1: I was driving for DoorDash on the weekend to make
some extra money. I worked a day job, so I
could only start driving later in the night. When I started,
it was a little past nine. I got my first
order and dropped it off, then drove back to where
the restaurants were. I drove in circles for a while,
maybe ten minutes, without getting a single order. It was late,
but on the weekends there would usually still be a
decent amount of orders. Finally one popped up and I
accepted it, though it was a small order with a
small tip. After that one, I waited in a parking
lot for almost twenty minutes before the next order came through.
Obviously this wasn't ideal, having to wait so long between
orders and not even getting to choose which orders to
accept unless I wanted to wait even longer. This order
was another small one, but some money was better than none,
so I accepted it. I picked up their bag from
Taco Bell and counted the items to make sure it
was right. Two tacos and some packets of hot sauce.
That was it. The delivery fee was probably more expensive
than the food. I confirmed that. I picked up the order,
then got the directions to the house. It was ten
minutes away in some regular neighborhood. A few minutes into
the drive, I pulled up to a red light. There
was almost nobody on the road at this time of night,
so I was just sitting at this empty intersection waiting
for it to turn green when a truck pulled up
next to me. I unconsciously looked over slightly, but the
man in the truck caught my attention enough to make
me turn my head fully. He was sticking his head
out of the window and looking down into my car,
not at me, but at my passenger seat, which had
the door dash bag in it. I looked back and
saw the light was green, so I pressed on the gas.
I had no idea why he was looking in my car,
but he made it very obvious and didn't even try
to hide it. I checked my mirrors and the truck
was now in my lane, cruising a good distance behind me.
As I continued driving along my route, the truck stayed
behind me, but I couldn't say for sure if he
was following me or not because the route was straight
all the way until the neighborhood. When I turned in,
I stared at my mirrors, waiting anxiously for the truck
to pass the entrance, but after ten seconds he turned
in behind me. There was a chance he just lived here,
and I knew that, but after seeing him looking in
my car, I felt like I was justified in my suspicions.
The route had me go down a few turns in
the neighborhood before taking me down to the last road
with the address on it. I turned, and right away
I saw the dead end sign a few houses down.
I braked and pulled over, staring at my rear view mirror.
The truck pulled him behind me and parked. As I
waited in my car trying to come up with a plan,
the truck behind me was just sitting there with its
headlights on. Then I got a text. It was from
the door dash customer, asking when the delivery would be arriving.
This was all coming together and I realized that the
man in the truck, likely my customer, was waiting for
me to get out of my car. Even though I
knew what was going on, I still had no way
of getting out of it. After a minute of me
panicking to figure an escape, the man got out of
his truck. He walked down to my car, but stopped
right by the trunk. I watched in my mirror as
he stood there looking at me through the back windshield.
It was a tense moment, making my head panic with thoughts.
Then all of a sudden, he slammed something into the windshield,
shattering it. I put the car in drive and floored
it just as the man jumped onto the back and
tried to crawl in through the broken glass. He fell
off as I made a tight U turn, and with
the time it took for him to get up, I
was able to carefully maneuver between his truck without any
more damage. I saw him wobble across the street as
I left and called nine one one. When police got there,
all they found were the broken shards of glass laying
in the road. I'm very thankful to have made it
out with nothing but a broken windshield, but that night
had me shaken up for months. I just hope he
not out there trying to trap more people and do
who knows what to them. I'm an uber driver mainly
working in a large suburb outside Las Vegas. The city
is a bit sketchy sometimes, but this suburb is known
for being a nicer area, so I never found myself
worrying too much. Sure i'd get some weird people sometimes,
but they were usually just drunk, high, or otherwise intoxicated
in some way. I'd worked for a few months with
no issues and found myself actually enjoying the job. On
this night, I was working around my usual time, between
six and ten PM. It was one of those nights
where I was getting a lot of people and making
a lot of money. When ten o'clock came around, I
chose to keep grinding out these pickups and make as
much as I could. The very next order after ten
was from someone eighteen minutes away at an undefined location.
This wasn't out of the ordinary. It usually just meant
they were on the side of a road somewhere, or
outside of some place that wasn't on the map. I
zoomed in and saw it was right next to a
storage garage. I began the drive, and when I was
five minutes away, I got a call from the customer.
I'm gonna be late. I need you to wait a
few minutes for me. Thanks, he said quickly, while breathing heavily,
like he just ran a mile. The man hung up
right after. I can't say I'd ever had someone tell
me that they were gonna be late, but I didn't
mind waiting a few minutes. I knew if I canceled it,
then he'd have to wait another ten to twenty minutes
for a new driver to get there, and I was
hoping that by waiting he'd give me a little extra
tip money. When I arrived, I didn't see anyone outside,
so I pulled in and parked in the storage garage
parking lot. I waited for five minutes. Then I saw
a man in my mirror. He was walking quickly out
of the storage building holding a large Duffel bag. When
he got my car, a nasty odor came from him.
I also saw that he was dripping in sweat, and
it was really gross. I'd picked up people from the
gym before, so this wasn't too terrible, but it never
made for a good experience. I tried to not make
a face and greeted him. The man said nothing, so
I got back on the road. During the ride, the
man held the Duffel bag on his lap and stared
forward without speaking a word. It made me feel uncomfortable,
so I didn't speak either. After a twenty minute drive
of awkwardness, I finally got to the destination. It was
a corner of a street, non an address. Before I
could even shift into park, the man hurried out and
started walking away. After all that, I wasn't expecting any
sort of tip, which was a disappointment and enough so
to get me to call it quits for the night.
During my drive home, I noticed that smell never left
my car, even when I tried rolling the windows down.
It was so bad that I had to pull over
and check to see if he had left something in
the back seat. I opened the door and immediately saw
some red spots on the seat. I'm no expert, but
it looked like blood. I called the police, and after
some looking, they confirmed that it was and there was
a lot of it. We tried to track the Uber account,
and the next day they even contacted the storage unit,
but had no luck with identifying the man. After thinking
back on all of it, though, I'm sure that guy
did something terrible just minutes before I picked him up.
I mean, he was sweating and carrying a duffel bag
with blood soaked into it, and on top of all that,
he used fake accounts with both Uber and the storage unit.
It really showed me that even in a place that's
considered to be nice and safe, there's still terrible people
doing terrible things. I took a week off from Uber,
then got back to it, but I'm way more cautious
about who I'm picking up. I'm a truck driver for
a moving company on the East Coast. We specialize in
cross country moving, typically moving people to the far West Coast,
which can take anywhere from twenty to forty hours depending
on the locations. I only did the driving for the company,
not any of the boxing or loading, so the actual
job was one hundred percent just driving and picking up
or dropping off the trailer at the houses. I'd been
working with this company for almost four years at the time.
This job was like every other. I got to the
pickup address and loaded up the trailer full of the
customer's belongings. This was a thirty hour drive in total,
which I would do with two to three short rest stops.
The hardest states to drive through are in the Midwest,
specifically Iowa and Nebraska. There's absolutely nothing there. It's just
dead roads with endless fields of grass beside them. It
makes for a very boring and therefore tiring drive. As
I passed through the Iowa border into Nebraska, the sun
had just set and I'd been on the road for
about twenty hours. I took a short break, already a
couple states back, but was just about ready for another.
My eyes were heavy and I could feel the drowsiness
coming in. But a few more miles down I saw
something on the side of the road. A car was
stopped off to the side of my lane with its
headlights on. It was a narrow road, so I slowed
down to carefully pass. As I did, I noticed the
exhaust was steaming, so the car was still running. There
was also a man leaning against the driver door and
looking right at me. I passed by and gave him
a nod, but as I got further down the road,
I saw him get back into the car. It was
very strange for someone to be sitting on the side
of an empty road with a car that still runs.
He didn't look like he was in any sort of trouble.
He looked like he was waiting. I checked my mirrors often,
but the car's headlights disappeared behind me. After a few minutes.
I was a bit more awake now, but my eyes
still felt heavy. Only a mile or so more down
the road, I saw another car. This one was sideways
in the middle of the road, and as I got closer,
I saw another vehicle on the side. It was a
large box van. I wasn't sure exactly of the situation,
but seeing that gave me a bad feeling. I eased
into my brakes, but the car stayed in the middle
of the road, so I was forced to come to
a full stop. I was maybe twenty yards away and
could see multiple men standing along the road and one
man in front of the car. I'd have to be
the dumbest person in the world to not understand what
this was. At this point, with no better options, I
started moving the truck backward. The men stayed where they were.
With this horrifying confidence, the light shined behind me and
a car approached, blocking the way back. A man got
out of the car, sprinting at the back of my trailer,
and at the same time, all of the men in
the front started sprinting at me too. In that instant,
my mind went blank and all of my adrenaline took over.
I slammed on the gas as I heard a pop
on the back of the trailer and the doors swung open.
The men in front yelled and tried to stand in
my way, but once they saw I wasn't stopping, they
jumped on the side of the road. I rammed right
into the car, knocking it off the road and completely
destroying it. A few gunshots sounded in the distance, but
none hit. I could hear cargo falling out of the
trailer for the next five miles before I was able
to call the police and meet an officer on the road.
Of course, this was a total mess, but as it
all unfolded, it turned out to be much more than
just a random attack and robbery. When police arrived at
the scene, the car had slammed into was left behind,
being damaged beyond drivable with it. They tracked down one
of the members of the attackers, who gave up information
on the others. They had information on the rich homeowners
that were moving and planned to stop me and steal
all of the belongings with their box van. They never
said what exactly they would have done to me after
they robbed the truck, but I don't think it's a
stretch to assume that it would have been a lot
easier for them to not leave any loose ends.