Lyft Driver Charged With Throwing Dog During Road Rage Incident

It can surely be frustrating to deal with other drivers out there, but there’s a difference between muttering insults under your breath accompanied by an indignant honk and throwing someone’s dog out of a car.

The New Jersey SPCA Humane Police filed criminal and civil animal cruelty charges against a Lyft driver after a video showed him apparently grabbing a dog out of another driver’s car and chucking it to the side during a road rage incident, reports NJ.com.

The fight

The dog’s owners — a husband and wife — claim the other man had been weaving in and out of traffic for a half-mile, before he got stuck at a bus stop and got out of his car, upset by being blocked.

“He was upset about the stopping bus in front of him, jumped out on our hood, stomped on the hood,” the woman told CBS New York.

Another driver caught the fight on tape as the man and the Lyft driver started throwing punches in the street.

That’s when the video shows the 22-year-old suspect reaching into the backseat of his foe’s car, scooping up his 12-year-old miniature pinscher named Daphne, and throwing her to the sidewalk. The dog then ran into the street — where she was grabbed by her owner — and the suspect drove away.

Warning: Bad language and dog-throwing in the video below

“Obviously he couldn’t get the best of me, so he chose to take an innocent animal and try to hurt me with that,” the dog’s owner told CBS New York.

The dog is gonna be okay

Daphne the dog wasn’t seriously harmed during the incident, investigators learned.

“Despite some bruises and stress resulting from this traumatic event, Daphne is recovering well,” the NJSPCA said.

Lyft says the driver wasn’t working for Lyft at the time of the alleged crime.

“We are shocked and horrified by what we saw in this video,” a Lyft spokeswoman said. “While this did not happen on the Lyft platform, we permanently deactivated the individual after learning of his truly cruel behavior; he will never again be able to use Lyft. We are relieved to hear that Daphne is recovering well.”

The Lyft driver’s mother insists that her son is an “animal lover,” telling CBS New York that the other man should be charged for the brawl. She claims her son was angry at being forced off the road, and wasn’t thinking when he grabbed the dog.

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist