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GUNS. KNIVES. BATS. HAMMERS. HATCHETS. SPEARS.


(Eli Durst for The Washington Post)

(Eli Durst for The Washington Post)
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As incidents of road rage escalate across the country, aggressive drivers in
Texas try to understand what triggers anger.

By Ruby Cramer
October 31, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
24 min
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Read by the author|Listen24 min

SAN ANTONIO — They arrive from the highways of San Antonio, where it is 91
degrees outside, and there is construction on the roads, and cellphones are
ringing, talk radio is blaring, people are tailgating, no one will let anyone
into their lane, horns start honking, middle fingers go up, car doors fly open,
and another day of road rage is underway in an increasingly angry country.

Now, in a small classroom on the edge of the city, Dean DeSoto, 70, looks over a
roster for his class on aggressive driving.

“Good morning,” he says, as 19 people walk into the room looking the way they
usually do at the start of class. Tired, annoyed, blank. Most of them don’t want
to be here, and DeSoto knows this. They are here because they have been
ticketed, fined and sent here by a judge to learn how to manage their anger and
anxiety on the road. They take their seats, and he begins to read aloud from a
list of their citations, most of which look like speeding violations.

“90 in a 65 … 94 in a 65 … 102 in a 65 … 105 in a 65 … 112 in a 60.”

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DeSoto, who runs a traffic safety nonprofit that partners with San Antonio’s
city and county courts, has been teaching his aggressive driving class for 26
years, and in that time, he has come to believe several things. One is that what
goes on in the country will play out on its roadways. Another is that anger on
the roads is getting worse. Across the country, the number of people injured or
killed in road rage incidents involving a gun has doubled since 2018, according
to data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group. There is no
uniform definition of aggressive driving across law enforcement agencies and no
national database to track it, but DeSoto has been keeping his own tally,
including cases in Texas involving guns, knives, ice picks, 2-by-4s, tire tools,
PVC pipe, plumbing pipe, bats, hammers, shovels, hatchets, ball bearings,
marbles, frozen water bottles, bricks, stones and, in at least one instance, a
spear.

On the road, the incidents can begin and end in as little as 30 seconds. But
another thing DeSoto has come to believe is that more than just reckless
behavior, the cases are a measure of the country’s stress, trauma and
polarization, and that made them part of a larger, longer story.

“So let’s start,” he says.

***

From left, Colten Bonk, Yufang Jin and Dean DeSoto present during an aggressive
driving course in San Antonio. (Eli Durst for The Washington Post)

A young woman goes first. She says she was speeding to pick up a sick aunt.

A man next to her says he was speeding to pick up his daughter from school.


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A man a few seats away goes next. “I was coming back from work,” he says, and
DeSoto, a certified intervention facilitator, gestures for him to keep talking,
trying to draw him out. These are not the people with spears, pipes and knives,
but this is a course about the different forms anger can take. “You’re driving a
vehicle that is 3 to 7,000 pounds,” DeSoto will tell them. “You can hurt
somebody.”

“I was just trying to go home,” the man says.

“Okay, that’s a start.”

Next person. A young woman. Speeding because — “okay, you’re gonna hate me, but
…” she begins to say.

“No,” DeSoto says.

“I’m sorry, but I like to go fast.”

“You go, girl,” another man says.

“Okay, so, how fast were you going?” DeSoto asks.

“I was going 103 in a 70.”

“Why do people become homicidal in a 30- to 45-second transaction? It’s more
than just the guns.”

“Ooh,” one person says, and another starts clapping.

“In a construction zone, too,” she says.

A few seats to her right, the next person to speak, a 41-year-old man whose
first name is Almir, sits up in his chair and, instead of talking about
speeding, says to the rest of the class, “People are just overwhelmed.”

He begins to list the reasons: inflation, job insecurity, constant TV, constant
news. “It’s, ‘Hey, look at this.’ ‘Look at this.’ ‘Look at that.’ ‘Should we
look at this?’ ‘Should I look at that?’ People are just losing it,” he says. He
had read stories about gunfights between strangers in Texas, where, as of 2021,
state law allows most adults to carry a handgun in public without a permit. He
had seen people scream at the nurses and administrators at the hospital where he
worked.

“And it’s hot,” a girl next to him says.

“Everything. Humans are just too overwhelmed with, just, everything,” Almir
says. “And in particular, in my case, I just wanted to avoid the guy …”

The larger, longer story: If Almir had wanted to explain it fully to the rest of
the class, he would have told them that what happened the day he was pulled over
wasn’t just about an angry and anxious world. It was part of a story that began
decades ago, when he was growing up in the mid-1990s during the war in Sarajevo.
His childhood memories were of grenades, emptied out buildings and a neighbor
who was abusive, leaving him with trauma he couldn’t talk about for years. Then
there was bullying at school, skipped classes and nights he ran away from home,
sleeping in abandoned houses. When his family resettled in the United States, he
began to see that any situation could provoke him into a reaction. It wasn’t
until he was in his 30s and met his wife, a licensed professional counselor,
that he started to realize why. She encouraged him to see a therapist. In the
beginning, he talked until he overwhelmed himself with crying. “If you cry, you
cry,” his wife told him. “Let it out. It’s an emotion.”

None of which he says in class. What he does say is, “I also got a short fuse.”
He turns to the girl who likes to drive fast and says: “I understand what she’s
saying. She’s gonna slow down as she grows older. When I was younger, you need
something. You’re understanding this world.”

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In his case, it took a long time to understand why he still doesn’t like when
someone touches him on the back, or why he hates harsh, sudden noises, or why he
would start saying “patience, patience” to himself when he looked in his
rearview mirror one day and saw a Mustang tailgating him. He was on his way home
with his 4-year-old daughter from her pediatrician appointment. It had already
been a stressful day. Her school had kept calling, asking him to update her
vaccinations. He had been laid off a few months earlier, and he didn’t have
health insurance, and now he was on Interstate 410 and the Mustang was inching
closer. He saw the driver gesturing angrily. He wanted to change lanes, but no
one would let him in, and his daughter was in the car seat behind him, asking
questions, as he watched the Mustang coming closer.

“Patience,” he told himself again, and when he saw a gap in the traffic, he
stepped on the gas, hit 90 mph, shifted lanes, saw the flashing lights of a
police car, and now he was here in this class.

“We are a very high-anxiety world right now,” DeSoto tells him. “Economic
pressures. Social pressures.”

“It’s everything,” Almir says again.

“It’s everything,” DeSoto says.

“I’m sorry, but I like to go fast. … I was going 103 in a 70.”

“Nine out of 10 times, I’m just trying to avoid. I see people having disputes
over stupid stuff at gas stations. They start shooting at each other. That’s
notorious in Texas. Notorious.”

“And again,” DeSoto says, “the point is here: Why do people become homicidal in
a 30- to 45-second transaction? It’s more than just the guns.”

“If you are into a mood or in a bad day and then — out of nowhere …”

“Therein lies the answer: state of mind.”

The class goes on. They watch a video about the brain’s response to fear. They
answer questions in their course book like, “How do you try to relax?” Almir
sits through a compilation of news clips on road rage that are filled with harsh
noises: first of honking, then a driver firing a gun five times in Miami, then a
driver throwing an ax, shattering a windshield in Washington state. A few seats
away, a man scrolls on his cellphone. A woman puts her head in her hands. DeSoto
looks around the room. “All right, so what is anger?” he asks, and Almir is the
first to answer.

“It’s an emotion,” he says.

***

There is no uniform definition of aggressive driving across law enforcement
agencies and no national database to track it. (Eli Durst for The Washington
Post)

In another part of the city, Anthony Williams, a 40-year-old police officer,
sees a sedan begin to accelerate in front of him. “Please don’t do it,” he says.

He glances at his radar. Eighty mph.

“Please don’t take off. Please don’t do that.”

Inside his unmarked Dodge Charger, Williams speeds up to get closer. He waits a
moment longer, hoping the car will slow down. Eighty-five mph. He groans. “Yeah,
they’re gonna get a ticket,” he says, and on come the blue-and-red lights of his
car.

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Williams opens the laptop mounted to his center console and types out the
license plate number as the sedan exits the highway and comes to a stop on the
side of the road. He checks his body camera and the camera on his dashboard and
eyes the vehicle ahead before he opens his door.

“Alrighty, then. We’ll see how this interaction is.”

All day long, this is what Williams does. His job is the 30-second transaction
on the road, not what comes before or after. “It’s a lot of road rage here,” he
says at the beginning of another shift. “I’ve seen it just getting worse.” In
San Antonio, the police department’s traffic unit has put a special focus on
aggressive driving, even as some jurisdictions across the country have moved to
limit low-level traffic stops since the start of the pandemic and the 2020
police killing of George Floyd. What this means for Williams is that each time
he approaches a car, he tries to prepare himself to encounter any possible
emotional state.

“Humans are just too overwhelmed with, just, everything.”

Now he returns from the sedan and steps back inside his car, relieved, which is
how he feels when he avoids a confrontation. “How are you doing today?” is how
he says he tries to begin every interaction, and sometimes, the response is,
“‘Why the f--- did you pull me over? Why’d you pull me over, why’d you pull me
over, why’d you pull me over?’”

“Let’s start over,” Williams says he will respond, trying to defuse the
situation, and it goes on from there: “My name is Officer Williams. Okay? Here’s
the reason why — just let me finish, please. This is the reason why I pulled you
over, okay? I have nothing against you. I have a job to do. Okay? I caught you
speeding. Ah, ah — let me finish. Let me finish. I have a job to do, okay?”

Williams thinks of his job as a series of interactions, and he believes that
most of the time, people are just having a bad day. Sometimes, Williams is
having a bad day, too, and when he does, he drives to a park and calls his wife
or sits in the silence of his car. He knows what happens to officers who let the
stress build. A few times, he’s screamed into his hands, “just to get it out,”
he says.

Traffic Officer Anthony Williams checks the terminal in his police car after
getting information from people involved in a high-speed crash on Interstate 410
in San Antonio. (Eli Durst for The Washington Post)Williams uses a notepad to
tally traffic violations. At the end of each shift, he compares these notes to
the information he enters in the computer to make sure they match up. (Eli Durst
for The Washington Post)

Now he pulls up beside a car on an access road and rolls down his window.

“You need to slow down, man. All right?”

“Okay, yeah,” the man says.

“Just slow it down, okay?”

He sees another car start to speed up. “Please don’t take off,” he says, but the
man does, and soon he is pulling the car over and writing a ticket.

He sees a woman texting as she moves down the highway. “Please get off it,” he
says, watching her use her phone. He pulls closer. “Come on.” But she’s still
texting, and he flips on his lights. Another ticket.

He sees a truck cut someone off near a highway exit, and he says: “Wow, wow,
wow. Bro, bro. That was bad. That was bad.”

Williams accelerates and flips on his lights. Another ticket.

“If you cry, you cry. Let it out. It’s an emotion.”

The next interaction comes in from his dispatcher — road rage on Interstate 410.
He dials the number of the woman who called in the report and listens as she
describes a driver following her from lane to lane, then giving her the middle
finger, then coming close to hitting her. “I try to stay away from people like
that,” the woman says. “I was like, ‘What the hell is she doing?’”

“That’s exactly what you do,” Williams tells her. “I’ve seen shootings. I’ve
seen stabbings. You don’t want to be part of none of that, okay?”

He gives her his badge number, tells her he’ll look into it and says he hopes
she has a better day.

On his computer, Williams begins to type a record of the incident and the phone
call.

“Just a couple sentences, a little narrative,” he says, and then the interaction
is over. He shuts his laptop, puts the car in drive and pulls out of the parking
lot, headed back to the highway.

***

The aggressive driving course focuses on drivers learning how to manage their
anger and anxiety on the road. (Eli Durst for The Washington Post)

After a few days, 10 students return to DeSoto’s classroom, here again because a
judge considered their citation serious enough for a second, more intensive
session of the aggressive driving course. They sit in the circle of chairs and
this time, halfway through the class, a 26-year-old man walks into the room and
takes a seat in the corner.

“This is Colten Bonk,” DeSoto says, and he tells the class Bonk is here to talk
about his own life with anger.

“Kind of a long story,” Bonk says.

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Bonk was also speeding. In his case, it was through downtown Fredericksburg,
Texas. A police officer had pulled him over, but instead of keeping the car in
park, he put it in drive and stepped on the gas. He saw the cop car behind him,
then more than one cop car. “I’ve seen the footage. It’s not good,” he says. He
kept driving until he flipped his Dodge Ram 2500, was ejected from the driver’s
seat, put his face through the windshield, hit his head on the concrete and
broke 23 bones, including his ribs, sternum and scapula. He was airlifted to a
hospital. When he woke up, he didn’t know who he was or recognize his parents.

What he would eventually remember was how he’d gotten there. He was an
alcoholic, and his anger had begun when he was 19 years old and a scholarship
student at St. Louis University. One night, a fight with his girlfriend became
physical. “I had a couple of black eyes, and I threw her on the ground. It took
me years to even talk about that, but that’s what I did,” he says. The next day,
he was arrested by campus police officers, accused of domestic violence and,
later, charged by the state. He left Missouri, lost his scholarship and “blamed
everyone around me,” he says. “The anger progressed and progressed, man.” By 22,
he got a DWI, went to rehab, got out, moved into a sober living house, relapsed,
got a second DWI, moved back into sober living — and then came the night he was
stopped in Fredericksburg and decided to take off.

Colten Bonk presented to the class about his struggles with anger and addiction
as well as his brush with death. (Eli Durst for The Washington Post)

“The last time I drank, when I was in Fredericksburg, I can’t tell you exactly
what was going through my mind,” he says.

“The police officer had you,” DeSoto says now. “The car was in park. What did he
tell you?”

“‘Don’t put in drive.’”

“That hair-trigger kicked in. … What triggered that?”

“I mean, probably a few things,” Bonk says.

“Fire away.”

“One was just fear and trauma,” he says. “I got to the point where I started
being angry even when I wasn’t drunk. Somebody would look at me wrong in the
room and I’m like, ‘The f--- is this guy’s problem, dude?’”

“We are a very high-anxiety world right now. Economic pressures. Social
pressures.”

Now Bonk looks out across the classroom.

“I mean, we all get angry, right?” he says. “You blame other people. You blame
other things. You blame other people on the road for how they’re driving or
whatever it is. But you play a part in everything, dude, trust me.”

The people in class listen in silence, and when DeSoto tells them to take a
10-minute break, a few of them hang back and walk over to Bonk.

“Really appreciate hearing that. Takes a lot of courage,” one of them says.

“Of course, dude,” Bonk says.

“I wanna say thank you.”

“Appreciate you saying that, dude,” Bonk says.

Behind them, a woman named Hailey is the last to approach.

“Hey, um, Colten,” she says. “Is there any way I could talk to you at some
point?”

***

A car after a high-speed crash on Interstate 410 in San Antonio. (Eli Durst for
The Washington Post)

“All right,” DeSoto says when the class is nearly finished, “What have you
picked up? Or did it go in one ear and out the other?”

They go around the room as they’d done in the beginning.

“I’m just more conscious of my state of mind,” a man says.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be speeding around,” another says.

“Okay,” DeSoto says, turning his attention to the woman who a few minutes before
had been telling Bonk how she ended up going 92 mph on the interstate. “Hailey?”

She was 20 years old. She had been living on her own since she was 18, she
explained one day outside of the classroom. She had been working at a restaurant
and earned just enough money for rent, groceries and a white Camry, which she
was driving the night she was pulled over with a load of freshly done laundry in
the back seat. At the time, she was trying to cut down on marijuana, which she
said she’d been using since she was a teenager, and that was part of one more
story in this class. From the ages of 5 to 12, she said, she was abused by
someone close to her family, and in the years afterward: therapy, mental health
hospitalizations and a disciplinary program in school called In-School
Suspension, or ISS, where she remembered sitting in a room and writing the same
phrase over and over in a workbook — “I’m in ISS because … I’m in ISS because …”

And now this new program with a workbook, where she had been doing her best to
answer the questions:

Why were you speeding?

“Trying to show off/pass in front of a sports car.”

What did you say to the police officer?

“That I saw him and started slowing down. It was a long day and I just wanted to
get home after doing laundry. That I’m broke and didn’t have money for the
tow/car insurance.”

What did the police officer say to you?

“That I was going way too fast in a 65 and that it was reckless driving and that
they would have to tow my car because I didn’t have insurance.”

Did you sleep well the night before?

“I have a hard time falling and staying asleep.”

“You blame other people on the road for how they’re driving or whatever it is.
But you play a part in everything, dude, trust me.”

In her apartment in the weeks leading up to her citation, she found herself on
social media more and more. One night it was scrolling past images of war in
Gaza, feeling a “dark hole of hopelessness” at what she saw. Another night, it
was videos of influencers sitting on the beach, traveling to places she had
never been, “in a competition of who’s doing better, who has this, who has that,
who’s making more money, who’s right, who’s wrong …” until the night her life
had brought her to DeSoto’s class, where he is now saying her name.

“Sorry,” she says to him, looking up. “What was the question?”

“What have you processed?”

“Um,” she says to DeSoto.

She talks about watching her speed and keeping distance from other drivers.

“Just overall trying to be more responsible,” she says.

“Very good,” DeSoto says, and Hailey returns to the workbook.

How do you define anger?

“Anger is a cover emotion …”

What emotions trigger anger?

“Fear, sadness, emptiness.”

After a few minutes, people begin to pack up their things. DeSoto wishes them
luck and hands them each a certificate that will allow them to expunge the
citations from their records.

They take out their car keys and their phones, and one by one, they begin to
leave the classroom, headed back to highways full of anger and anxiety, until
only one person is left seated.

Hailey, still writing.

DeSoto believes what goes on in the country will play out on its roadways. (Eli
Durst for The Washington Post)
MORE DEEP READS

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Ruby CramerRuby Cramer is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post focused
on writing narratives.@rubycramer
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cookies and associated data for strictly necessary purposes and process
non-cookie data as set forth in our Privacy Policy (consistent with law and, if
applicable, other choices you have made).


WE AND OUR PARTNERS PROCESS COOKIE DATA TO PROVIDE:

Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Create profiles for
personalised advertising. Use profiles to select personalised advertising.
Create profiles to personalise content. Use profiles to select personalised
content. Measure advertising performance. Measure content performance.
Understand audiences through statistics or combinations of data from different
sources. Develop and improve services. Store and/or access information on a
device. Use limited data to select content. Use limited data to select
advertising. List of Partners (vendors)

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