An Indiana couple says they were targeted by an erratic driver who chased them, ran them off the road and threw objects at them and other cars before eluding police. 

Kayla Harden-Roberts, her husband and their 7-year-old son were heading to their home from the Indianapolis area when she says a driver in a red Subaru Outback “tried to kill us.”

She said the family was westbound on I-70 en route from Indianapolis to Terre Haute, Indiana when up ahead of them, they saw a driver that appeared to be “annoying” other motorists with erratic driving. They thought the motorist was drunk, she said, noting that when a BMW passed the Subaru, the driver leaned out of his window and threw objects at the BMW as it sped away. She called police and reported the driver.

The Subaru slowed down in the fast lane, Harden-Roberts said, so her husband flashed his headlights to indicate he would like to pass the other car.

“That’s when he targeted us,” she said.

“He wouldn’t let us pass for about 10 miles,” she writes in the Facebook post. “He sped up to about 80 mph and then stomped on his brakes and ran us off the road.”

She had called police to alert them, she said, and her husband tried to pull off at an exit, but the other motorist sped up ahead of them and stopped to block the exit ramp. The driver also hung out the window of his car and started throwing things at her car.

It was a bizarre situation, she said, so her husband continued down I-70 with nowhere else to go. They contacted police a second time. 

Indiana State Police First Sgt. Matt Mischler told the Tribune-Star that the call was handed off to Clay County Central Dispatch at 11:08 p.m. when the vehicles were at the Clay-Putnam County line. No ISP road units were available to respond.

As her husband continued to drive, Harden-Roberts said she was able to signal to a semi-truck driver that she needed help. That driver contacted other truckers who boxed in the Subaru away from the couple as they continued down the highway. She said her husband took the exit at Indiana 59 south of Brazil, but then the incident escalated because the Subaru driver pulled off at the same exit, passed them and stopped to block the road. At that point, she said, the driver got out of his car and tried to jump on the hood of the Roberts’s vehicle. As her husband drove around him, the man jumped on the side of her car, then got back into his vehicle and followed them to a gas station at the interchange.

“The police wanted us to stop the car, but we couldn’t because every time we did the guy got out and tried to jump on my car!” Harden-Roberts wrote. “So all we could do was drive in circles around the parking lot. We stopped and he got out one more time, and finally we heard sirens.”

That was about the time the man screamed that he had a 5-month-old child in the car, she said. The man jumped in his car and took off as the sirens got near.

Brandon Roberts said he thought he saw a dark-haired woman in the car with the man, but he could not get a good look at her because it was so dark. But said he does believe there was a passenger in the Subaru throughout the incident. And he was surprised when the man yelled that he had a 5-month-old child in his vehicle.

Brandon said he got out of his car to talk to police and explained the situation. The deputies directed the couple to stay put for a while. Officers checked the area but could not locate the car.

“They came back about 10 to 15 minutes later,” she said of the police.

“They don’t know where the guy went,” Brandon added.

Harden-Roberts said that as scary as the situation was, she also feels scared for the woman who might have been in the car, and the young child as well, if they were actually in the car.

“We’re all pretty traumatized,” she said of herself and her son.

Both the Indiana State Police at Putnamville and the Clay County Sheriff’s Department have confirmed that they received information about the incident, which ended at about 11:30 p.m.

“Someone knows him,” Harden-Roberts said, noting that she gave police the license plate number of the offending driver. “The police said they were going to try to find him, but we haven’t heard anything yet.”

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) “‘road rage’ is…the angry and violent behaviors at the extreme of the aggressive driving continuum.” Aggressive driving “comprises following too closely, driving at excessive speeds, weaving through traffic, running stop lights and signs, and occasionally escalates to gesturing in anger or yelling at another motorist, confrontation, physical assault, and even murder.” Aggressive driving is a traffic violation whereas road rage is a criminal offense, according to the NHTSA. A AAA Foundation study in 2009 found that aggressive driving was a factor in 56 percent of fatal accidents between 2003 and 2007.

Trigg is a reporter at The Tribune Star in Terre Haute, Indiana.