If you need a few minutes with that headline, I can understand. We’ve all heard scary tales of someone’s last straw snapping while in their car. We have no idea who threw a spear through this Texas woman’s windshield, nearly impaling her.

Someone threw a spear through a driver’s windshield

Around 9:30 p.m. on Monday, August 21, 2023, off Interstate 10 East and Farm-to-Market 1516 in San Antonio, TX, a woman was inches from being impaled by a black hunting spear that slid through her windshield, burying its blade in the back of the steering wheel.

News4SA reports that ​​Shavone Canales was driving along when the spear came out of nowhere. She pulled over to find how narrowly the spear missed piercing her torso. Amazingly, she wasn’t injured at all but had no clue where the spear came from. Understandably, a few steps past angry, she told local reporters, “Somebody knows something, so I’m hoping somebody comes forward because that is so dangerous. Because if it’s not me, it’s going to be somebody else,” says Canales.

Canales pulled out her cell phone and began filming. She captured chilling video footage of an officer pulling the anachronistic weapon out of its hole in the glass. The officer holds the spear up, showing its 5-ft long shaft punctuated by a menacing point.

San Antonio Police are combing nearby surveillance cameras for who may have thrown the spear. Sgt. Washington Moscoso says, “No one should ever throw any kind of object toward a vehicle, towards a highway, or toward a busy road…you don’t know how the driver hear that sound hit their vehicle, you don’t know how they’re going to react.”

While we can’t disagree with the good Sgt, I think he might be underestimating what the spear thrower was going for.

Is road rage getting worse? 

According to a study conducted by The Zebra, the number of road rage injuries and deaths involving guns or knives has gone up every year since 2018. According to the same study, 34% of drivers from the study carry at least one weapon in their cars. Pepper spray is the most common, with 13% of the drivers claiming to carry it every day. 10% of the participants said they carried a knife, while the other 10% said they carried a gun in their car. 

Despite the more violent instances of road rage, the study shows that road rage might be down overall. 92% of people said they could recall at least one incident of road rage or overly aggressive driving in the past year, and 89% said they had been on the receiving end of the rage. Clearly, road rage is plenty bad with percentages like that. However, it’s down 3% from when the survey was conducted in 2021.

We have to make our roads safer

The thing that makes this spear story so scary is that we don’t know if it was road rage, personal beef, or a completely random act of violence. Senseless violence aimed at no one in particular seems to be a more common occurrence, too. While anecdotal, it does feel as though stories like this are all too common and leave us with more questions than answers. How do things like this affect the auto industry? Do situations like this make the case for further automation? Standard dash cams? All we can say for sure is that on top of everything else going on in the world, now we have to look out for spears while driving.