There are a number of different ways to escalate a road rage incident from horn honking, rude gestures, and aggressive driving into something else entirely. Once an roadway antagonist throws weapons into the mix, that's probably the most surefire way to turn things up to 11.
When faced with that escalated situation, the target or targets of the road rage will react in one of two ways. Either they'll get the hell out of Dodge, or match the weapon wielder's intensity and fight back. For all you psych majors out there, the situation channels a fight-or-flight response. Well, in the case of road rage altercation that went down in Chicago late last week, the use of a weapon -- a baseball bat, to be exact -- went the fight over the flight route, causing a full-on fistfight of epic proportions.
Per ABC News:
Illinois State Police said the incident unfolded during rush hour on Interstate 57 on Chicago's south side early Thursday morning after a woman cut in front of a gray Hyundai while swinging a baseball bat out of the window.
Once in front of the car, she jumps out and smashes the bat onto the hood of the Hyundai. That's when a passenger in that car gets out and confronts the bat-wielding woman.
Cellphone video taken from a vehicle behind the two cars showed the two women throwing punches and pulling each other's hair. The situation escalated even further when driver of the Hyundai exits the vehicle and tries to wrestle the bat away in an apparent effort to protect her passenger.
She eventually gains control of the bat and gets ready to swing. The video ends there. One witness said the two women in the Hyundai appeared to be mother and daughter.
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So, if the witness is on the money with this one, that means we had a mother-daughter team pitted against a baseball-wielding maniac hoping to dish out some serious damage. Not the kind of match-up you want to see go down during your daily commute.
"I've never seen nothing like that before. It looked like they were doing a lot of slapping at first and grabbing, but then they started to do a lot of punching," the witness said. "It looks like the older lady was trying to grab the young lady by her hair to get her off her daughter."
Naturally, the Illinois State Police are investigating the highway dust-up, though no arrests have yet been made.
"The ISP responded to the above location and did not locate any involved parties or witnesses on scene," police said in a statement Friday. "An investigation into this incident is currently open and ongoing; the investigation is currently in its preliminary stages. The Illinois State Police takes all cases of physical violence on our expressways seriously."
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