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It started as a typical Saturday for Patrick Sweeney and his mom, but it ended with weapons drawn.
“We were going to Target at the time, and the road by Lowe’s, it goes from a two-way to a one-way,” Sweeney said. “The guy next to us, he, you know typical guy, wouldn’t let us go over, wouldn’t let us get behind him. He kept speeding up slowing down, flipping us off.”
So, Sweeney’s mom honked her horn at the man and that’s when things escalated.
“He was not a fan of that he started screaming, flipping his hands all over. He almost decided to pull some sort of law enforcement maneuver where he blocked the lane, so we couldn’t go around him.”
With nowhere to go, Sweeney and his mom pulled into a store lot, but the other driver followed them.
“He screamed, ‘pulled the [expletive] over, get out of the way, get in there now,’ so we had no choice we were going to pull over,” Sweeney said.
The other driver got out of his car and went straight to the driver’s window, where Sweeney’s mom sat.
“He reaches in and says, ‘I am going to [expletive] kill you, [expletive]. You’re [expletive] dead. I am going to blow your [expletive] head off,’” Sweeney explained. “He said, ‘I’ve got an [expletive] gun, and so I grabbed my Byrna.’”
Sweeney said he always carries his Byrna with him.
“I grabbed it right out of the holster, and I pulled it off and I said, ‘hey, back off. This isn’t going to go this way,’” he said.
Sweeney said the man racked the slide on the firearm and continued to scream at him and his mother for several minutes.
“I finally screamed, ‘back the [expletive] off,’ he starts backing up and my mother just floors the gas,” he said.
It didn’t end there. Sweeney said the man continued to chase them as he was on the phone with 9-1-1 dispatchers.
“About two miles up the road, we finally see flashing lights coming down,” Sweeney said. “He was taken into booking and processing.”
