SAN ANTONIO – A video that has millions of views on social media shows a dangerous scene on a busy highway on the Northwest Side.
The video was recorded Sunday night on Interstate 10 near Callaghan Road. You can hear gunshots and see the aftermath of what’s often referred to as a street car takeover.
San Antonio police said cars shut down the eastbound lanes of I-10 around 10 p.m. and drivers started doing donuts on the highway.
Police said a person inside a white Dodge Challenger exited his vehicle and started shooting, causing drivers on both sides of the highway to speed away from the scene.
The chaos led to a four-car crash on the westbound lanes of I-10, police said.
A father and son who were in traffic recorded the incident on their phones.
“Not even long after we had been there, just a couple of minutes, we heard rounds start going off,” said the father who wanted to go by the name Doc. “We can just see people start scrambling in each direction when it first went off.”
“Our initial reaction was ‘get your head down’ and then people started clearing out a lot faster,” said Doc’s son, RJ. “Your fight or flight activates, and so people started getting out of there. But you also had people that were pretty panicked and stopped in the middle of the highway.”
Car takeovers are not uncommon in San Antonio.
“They block an intersection, street, the highway and do some donuts and usually get up out of there pretty quick. It’s not indicative of what the car community is about. It was just an unfortunate incident,” Doc said.
RJ posted the video on social media in an effort to get the word out about this activity. It had more than four million views on TikTok as of Monday afternoon.
“You have situations like that where it gets out of control and then things blow out of proportion, people start panicking and people end up getting hurt,” RJ said.
Police said no witnesses of the shooting stayed to cooperate with the investigation and everyone involved in the ensuing crashes did not want to be transported to the hospital.