Truck drivers raging on the road
For about 11 miles, the two truckers dueled recklessly down Chicago-area expressways, swerving in front of each other and riding each other’s bumpers.
Then one of them barked into his CB radio: “Let’s do it!”
With that, they pulled over and began a fistfight that ended when one allegedly plunged a buck knife into the other three times. David Seddon of Racine, Wis., has been charged with first-degree murder.
Several truckers said they didn’t find the Jan. 15 incident surprising.
“There’s a lot of stress out here for different people,” said Rollin Pizzala, a trucker from Kenosha, Wis., who has been driving rigs in the Chicago area for nearly four decades.
Pizzala pointed to diminishing profits for truckers because of high gas prices and the recession, but also mentioned sharing the road with “four wheelers” that he said cut in front of truckers and travel in their blind spots.
Pizzala and other truckers say a stream of taunts and threats from young truckers they call “CB Rambos” fill radio Channel 19.
“A lot of truckers don’t even turn on the CB anymore because we don’t want to listen to all that trash,” he said during a recent snowy drive from Kenosha to Indianapolis and back.
During the return trip, drivers could be heard talking over each other, much of it harmless rants, but with inflammatory snippets breaking through:
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I can pull over this here truck to the side of the road and . . .”
Trucker Abdool Gafur, 68, an Indian American from Connecticut, said he frequently encounters the same taunt on the radio: “Why the hell don’t you go back to your country?”
His accent, he said, prompts the insults. He said he has been invited to pull over and “settle things,” but shrugs it off.
“It would be stupid to stop and fight,” he said.
Leon James, a University of Hawaii psychology professor who has studied road rage for 25 years, said virtually every motorist at some point has experienced what he described as “the intense obsession to retaliate, to let the person know he or she has done something bad.”
But Don Schaefer, executive vice president of the Mid-West Truckers Assn., downplayed the problem. CB chatter can get heated, he said, but it’s usually a few bellicose “kooks,” and almost always just talk.
“Channel 19 is kind of like their private channel to go out there and vent some steam,” he said. “To have guys get so mad at each other on the CB that they pulled over on the side of the road, and to see what happened there, I think that shocked everybody.”
But Gary Walton of Springfield, Mo., wasn’t surprised. In 2002, his 28-year-old son pulled to the side of an exit ramp near Romeoville, Ill., after a dispute with another driver. The pair fought until the other driver pulled a knife and fatally stabbed Walton’s son. The driver was acquitted of second-degree murder after a judge ruled that the younger Walton was the aggressor.
“When you get two people at that age, adrenaline running, you get people doing things they shouldn’t do,” the elder Walton said.
An over-the-road driver for three decades, Walton said he thinks most people are like he was: unaware of the danger until it’s too late.
“They’ve got Mothers Against Drunk Drivers,” he said. “We need Fathers Against Road Rage.”
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