Homeowner recounts encounter with car thieves: 'I didn’t know if they were going to try to hit me again'
Washington state resident Eric Smith tells 'The Ingraham Angle' he wasn't going to let the theft happen.
The nationwide crime wave came very close to home for one Washington state man, after his Ring video doorbell alerted him to activity in his driveway early in the morning last Wednesday.
Eric Smith of Puyallup, near Tacoma, witnessed two men allegedly trying to steal his pickup truck. He told Fox News that when he looked out and saw his truck's door open, he pledged not to become the latest crime victim statistic.
Smith said he sees stories and online posts daily involving neighbors recounting their brushes with increasingly brazen criminals.
"I'm always looking at the map to see if it's close to me. And… it's not. But it just happened to be that night. And that was the situation I ran into," he said Monday on "The Ingraham Angle."
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Smith raced to his front driveway and encountered a man rummaging through his truck from the passenger side, while another individual sat in a waiting car in the street. He said when he slammed his front door, the noise startled the burglar.
When the man tried to run, Smith chased him and eventually began grappling with him – just as the individual in the car appeared to make a K-turn and realign the vehicle with the scuffle.
The getaway driver then revved the car and sped toward Smith, just as the Ring video showed Smith and the burglar briefly disengage. The driver struck Smith and appeared to brush the burglar.
Smith appeared to jump so as not to end up under the car and was seen clinging to the windshield as the car struck the right-front quarterpanel of his pickup.
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The impediment caused Smith to roll off the front of the car, and he said he was essentially uninjured.
"I think I had the mentality, the mindset, that I didn't want this to happen to me," he said.
"[There] is a growing popularity of criminal activity in the area…. [A]s soon as I saw my truck door open, I was like, 'no, it's not going to happen to me'."
Host Laura Ingraham added that carjacking and thefts from automobiles are a nationwide issue, from Puyallup, Washington to Washington, D.C.
Smith later added that once he was able to put hands on the alleged thief, he realized he was a young teenager. At that moment, he believed he would be able to hold him there until law enforcement could be dispatched.
"But things changed very quickly when the driver of the vehicle decided to back up and try to come between us. That's exactly what happened. And I was very, very, very lucky and fortunate that it ended the way it did," Smith said.
Smith added he had the wherewithal to whip out his phone and attempt to photograph the getaway car's plate and its occupants after he landed on his feet.
"If they were willing to hit me, who knows what they were going to do next. I didn't know if they were going to try to hit me again. So I tried to create that space…" he said.
As of Sunday, police in nearby Federal Way, Wash., arrested a juvenile suspected of being the would-be thief in-question. The driver is still at-large, according to KOMO.
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