As incidents of road rage escalate across the country, aggressive drivers in Texas try to understand what triggers anger.
SAN ANTONIO — They arrive from the highways of San Antonio, where it is 91 degrees outside, and there is construction on the roads, and cellphones are ringing, talk radio is blaring, people are tailgating, no one will let anyone into their lane, horns start honking, middle fingers go up, car doors fly open, and another day of road rage is underway in an increasingly angry country.
Now, in a small classroom on the edge of the city, Dean DeSoto, 70, looks over a roster for his class on aggressive driving.
“Good morning,” he says, as 19 people walk into the room looking the way they usually do at the start of class. Tired, annoyed, blank. Most of them don’t want to be here, and DeSoto knows this. They are here because they have been ticketed, fined and sent here by a judge to learn how to manage their anger and anxiety on the road. They take their seats, and he begins to read aloud from a list of their citations, most of which look like speeding violations.
“90 in a 65 … 94 in a 65 … 102 in a 65 … 105 in a 65 … 112 in a 60.”
DeSoto, who runs a traffic safety nonprofit that partners with San Antonio’s city and county courts, has been teaching his aggressive driving class for 26 years, and in that time, he has come to believe several things. One is that what goes on in the country will play out on its roadways. Another is that anger on the roads is getting worse. Across the country, the number of people injured or killed in road rage incidents involving a gun has doubled since 2018, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group. There is no uniform definition of aggressive driving across law enforcement agencies and no national database to track it, but DeSoto has been keeping his own tally, including cases in Texas involving guns, knives, ice picks, 2-by-4s, tire tools, PVC pipe, plumbing pipe, bats, hammers, shovels, hatchets, ball bearings, marbles, frozen water bottles, bricks, stones and, in at least one instance, a spear.
On the road, the incidents can begin and end in as little as 30 seconds. But another thing DeSoto has come to believe is that more than just reckless behavior, the cases are a measure of the country’s stress, trauma and polarization, and that made them part of a larger, longer story.
“So let’s start,” he says.
***
A young woman goes first. She says she was speeding to pick up a sick aunt.
A man next to her says he was speeding to pick up his daughter from school.
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A man a few seats away goes next. “I was coming back from work,” he says, and DeSoto, a certified intervention facilitator, gestures for him to keep talking, trying to draw him out. These are not the people with spears, pipes and knives, but this is a course about the different forms anger can take. “You’re driving a vehicle that is 3 to 7,000 pounds,” DeSoto will tell them. “You can hurt somebody.”
“I was just trying to go home,” the man says.
“Okay, that’s a start.”
Next person. A young woman. Speeding because — “okay, you’re gonna hate me, but …” she begins to say.
“No,” DeSoto says.
“I’m sorry, but I like to go fast.”
“You go, girl,” another man says.
“Okay, so, how fast were you going?” DeSoto asks.
“I was going 103 in a 70.”
“Ooh,” one person says, and another starts clapping.
“In a construction zone, too,” she says.
A few seats to her right, the next person to speak, a 41-year-old man whose first name is Almir, sits up in his chair and, instead of talking about speeding, says to the rest of the class, “People are just overwhelmed.”
He begins to list the reasons: inflation, job insecurity, constant TV, constant news. “It’s, ‘Hey, look at this.’ ‘Look at this.’ ‘Look at that.’ ‘Should we look at this?’ ‘Should I look at that?’ People are just losing it,” he says. He had read stories about gunfights between strangers in Texas, where, as of 2021, state law allows most adults to carry a handgun in public without a permit. He had seen people scream at the nurses and administrators at the hospital where he worked.
“And it’s hot,” a girl next to him says.
“Everything. Humans are just too overwhelmed with, just, everything,” Almir says. “And in particular, in my case, I just wanted to avoid the guy …”
The larger, longer story: If Almir had wanted to explain it fully to the rest of the class, he would have told them that what happened the day he was pulled over wasn’t just about an angry and anxious world. It was part of a story that began decades ago, when he was growing up in the mid-1990s during the war in Sarajevo. His childhood memories were of grenades, emptied out buildings and a neighbor who was abusive, leaving him with trauma he couldn’t talk about for years. Then there was bullying at school, skipped classes and nights he ran away from home, sleeping in abandoned houses. When his family resettled in the United States, he began to see that any situation could provoke him into a reaction. It wasn’t until he was in his 30s and met his wife, a licensed professional counselor, that he started to realize why. She encouraged him to see a therapist. In the beginning, he talked until he overwhelmed himself with crying. “If you cry, you cry,” his wife told him. “Let it out. It’s an emotion.”
None of which he says in class. What he does say is, “I also got a short fuse.” He turns to the girl who likes to drive fast and says: “I understand what she’s saying. She’s gonna slow down as she grows older. When I was younger, you need something. You’re understanding this world.”
In his case, it took a long time to understand why he still doesn’t like when someone touches him on the back, or why he hates harsh, sudden noises, or why he would start saying “patience, patience” to himself when he looked in his rearview mirror one day and saw a Mustang tailgating him. He was on his way home with his 4-year-old daughter from her pediatrician appointment. It had already been a stressful day. Her school had kept calling, asking him to update her vaccinations. He had been laid off a few months earlier, and he didn’t have health insurance, and now he was on Interstate 410 and the Mustang was inching closer. He saw the driver gesturing angrily. He wanted to change lanes, but no one would let him in, and his daughter was in the car seat behind him, asking questions, as he watched the Mustang coming closer.
“Patience,” he told himself again, and when he saw a gap in the traffic, he stepped on the gas, hit 90 mph, shifted lanes, saw the flashing lights of a police car, and now he was here in this class.
“We are a very high-anxiety world right now,” DeSoto tells him. “Economic pressures. Social pressures.”
“It’s everything,” Almir says again.
“It’s everything,” DeSoto says.
“Nine out of 10 times, I’m just trying to avoid. I see people having disputes over stupid stuff at gas stations. They start shooting at each other. That’s notorious in Texas. Notorious.”
“And again,” DeSoto says, “the point is here: Why do people become homicidal in a 30- to 45-second transaction? It’s more than just the guns.”
“If you are into a mood or in a bad day and then — out of nowhere …”
“Therein lies the answer: state of mind.”
The class goes on. They watch a video about the brain’s response to fear. They answer questions in their course book like, “How do you try to relax?” Almir sits through a compilation of news clips on road rage that are filled with harsh noises: first of honking, then a driver firing a gun five times in Miami, then a driver throwing an ax, shattering a windshield in Washington state. A few seats away, a man scrolls on his cellphone. A woman puts her head in her hands. DeSoto looks around the room. “All right, so what is anger?” he asks, and Almir is the first to answer.
“It’s an emotion,” he says.
***
In another part of the city, Anthony Williams, a 40-year-old police officer, sees a sedan begin to accelerate in front of him. “Please don’t do it,” he says.
He glances at his radar. Eighty mph.
“Please don’t take off. Please don’t do that.”
Inside his unmarked Dodge Charger, Williams speeds up to get closer. He waits a moment longer, hoping the car will slow down. Eighty-five mph. He groans. “Yeah, they’re gonna get a ticket,” he says, and on come the blue-and-red lights of his car.
Williams opens the laptop mounted to his center console and types out the license plate number as the sedan exits the highway and comes to a stop on the side of the road. He checks his body camera and the camera on his dashboard and eyes the vehicle ahead before he opens his door.
“Alrighty, then. We’ll see how this interaction is.”
All day long, this is what Williams does. His job is the 30-second transaction on the road, not what comes before or after. “It’s a lot of road rage here,” he says at the beginning of another shift. “I’ve seen it just getting worse.”In San Antonio, the police department’s traffic unit has put a special focus on aggressive driving, even as some jurisdictions across the country have moved to limit low-level traffic stops since the start of the pandemic and the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. What this means for Williams is that each time he approaches a car, he tries to prepare himself to encounter any possible emotional state.
Now he returns from the sedan and steps back inside his car, relieved, which is how he feels when he avoids a confrontation. “How are you doing today?” is how he says he tries to begin every interaction, and sometimes, the response is, “‘Why the f— did you pull me over? Why’d you pull me over, why’d you pull me over, why’d you pull me over?’”
“Let’s start over,” Williams says he will respond, trying to defuse the situation, and it goes on from there: “My name is Officer Williams. Okay? Here’s the reason why — just let me finish, please. This is the reason why I pulled you over, okay? I have nothing against you. I have a job to do. Okay? I caught you speeding. Ah, ah — let me finish. Let me finish. I have a job to do, okay?”
Williams thinks of his job as a series of interactions, and he believes that most of the time, people are just having a bad day. Sometimes, Williams is having a bad day, too, and when he does, he drives to a park and calls his wife or sits in the silence of his car. He knows what happens to officers who let the stress build. A few times, he’s screamed into his hands, “just to get it out,” he says.
Now he pulls up beside a car on an access road and rolls down his window.
“You need to slow down, man. All right?”
“Okay, yeah,” the man says.
“Just slow it down, okay?”
He sees another car start to speed up. “Please don’t take off,” he says, but the man does, and soon he is pulling the car over and writing a ticket.
He sees a woman texting as she moves down the highway. “Please get off it,” he says, watching her use her phone. He pulls closer. “Come on.” But she’s still texting, and he flips on his lights. Another ticket.
He sees a truck cut someone off near a highway exit, and he says: “Wow, wow, wow. Bro, bro. That was bad. That was bad.”
Williams accelerates and flips on his lights. Another ticket.
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The next interaction comes in from his dispatcher — road rage on Interstate 410. He dials the number of the woman who called in the report and listens as she describes a driver following her from lane to lane, then giving her the middle finger, then coming close to hitting her. “I try to stay away from people like that,” the woman says. “I was like, ‘What the hell is she doing?’”
“That’s exactly what you do,” Williams tells her. “I’ve seen shootings. I’ve seen stabbings. You don’t want to be part of none of that, okay?”
He gives her his badge number, tells her he’ll look into it and says he hopes she has a better day.
On his computer, Williams begins to type a record of the incident and the phone call.
“Just a couple sentences, a little narrative,” he says, and then the interaction is over. He shuts his laptop, puts the car in drive and pulls out of the parking lot, headed back to the highway.
***
After a few days, 10 students return to DeSoto’s classroom, here again because a judge considered their citation serious enough for a second, more intensive session of the aggressive driving course. They sit in the circle of chairs and this time, halfway through the class, a 26-year-old man walks into the room and takes a seat in the corner.
“This is Colten Bonk,” DeSoto says, and he tells the class Bonk is here to talk about his own life with anger.
“Kind of a long story,” Bonk says.
Bonk was also speeding. In his case, it was through downtown Fredericksburg, Texas. A police officer had pulled him over, but instead of keeping the car in park, he put it in drive and stepped on the gas. He saw the cop car behind him, then more than one cop car. “I’ve seen the footage. It’s not good,” he says. He kept driving until he flipped his Dodge Ram 2500, was ejected from the driver’s seat, put his face through the windshield, hit his head on the concrete and broke 23 bones, including his ribs, sternum and scapula. He was airlifted to a hospital. When he woke up, he didn’t know who he was or recognize his parents.
What he would eventually remember was how he’d gotten there. He was an alcoholic, and his anger had begun when he was 19 years old and a scholarship student at St. Louis University. One night, a fight with his girlfriend became physical. “I had a couple of black eyes, and I threw her on the ground. It took me years to even talk about that, but that’s what I did,” he says. The next day, he was arrested by campus police officers, accused of domestic violence and, later, charged by the state. He left Missouri, lost his scholarship and “blamed everyone around me,” he says. “The anger progressed and progressed, man.” By 22, he got a DWI, went to rehab, got out, moved into a sober living house, relapsed, got a second DWI, moved back into sober living — and then came the night he was stopped in Fredericksburg and decided to take off.
“The last time I drank, when I was in Fredericksburg, I can’t tell you exactly what was going through my mind,” he says.
“The police officer had you,” DeSoto says now. “The car was in park. What did he tell you?”
“‘Don’t put in drive.’”
“That hair-trigger kicked in. … What triggered that?”
“I mean, probably a few things,” Bonk says.
“Fire away.”
“One was just fear and trauma,” he says. “I got to the point where I started being angry even when I wasn’t drunk. Somebody would look at me wrong in the room and I’m like, ‘The f— is this guy’s problem, dude?’”
Now Bonk looks out across the classroom.
“I mean, we all get angry, right?” he says. “You blame other people. You blame other things. You blame other people on the road for how they’re driving or whatever it is. But you play a part in everything, dude, trust me.”
The people in class listen in silence, and when DeSoto tells them to take a 10-minute break, a few of them hang back and walk over to Bonk.
“Really appreciate hearing that. Takes a lot of courage,” one of them says.
“Of course, dude,” Bonk says.
“I wanna say thank you.”
“Appreciate you saying that, dude,” Bonk says.
Behind them, a woman named Hailey is the last to approach.
“Hey, um, Colten,” she says. “Is there any way I could talk to you at some point?”
***
“All right,” DeSoto says when the class is nearly finished, “What have you picked up? Or did it go in one ear and out the other?”
They go around the room as they’d done in the beginning.
“I’m just more conscious of my state of mind,” a man says.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be speeding around,” another says.
“Okay,” DeSoto says, turning his attention to the woman who a few minutes before had been telling Bonk how she ended up going 92 mph on the interstate. “Hailey?”
She was 20 years old. She had been living on her own since she was 18, she explained one day outside of the classroom. She had been working at a restaurant and earned just enough money for rent, groceries and a white Camry, which she was driving the night she was pulled over with a load of freshly done laundry in the back seat. At the time, she was trying to cut down on marijuana, which she said she’d been using since she was a teenager, and that was part of one more story in this class. From the ages of 5 to 12, she said, she was abused by someone close to her family, and in the years afterward: therapy, mental health hospitalizations and a disciplinary program in school called In-School Suspension, or ISS, where she remembered sitting in a room and writing the same phrase over and over in a workbook — “I’m in ISS because … I’m in ISS because …”
And now this new program with a workbook, where she had been doing her best to answer the questions:
Why were you speeding?
“Trying to show off/pass in front of a sports car.”
What did you say to the police officer?
“That I saw him and started slowing down. It was a long day and I just wanted to get home after doing laundry. That I’m broke and didn’t have money for the tow/car insurance.”
What did the police officer say to you?
“That I was going way too fast in a 65 and that it was reckless driving and that they would have to tow my car because I didn’t have insurance.”
Did you sleep well the night before?
“I have a hard time falling and staying asleep.”
In her apartment in the weeks leading up to her citation, she found herself on social media more and more. One night it was scrolling past images of war in Gaza, feeling a “dark hole of hopelessness” at what she saw. Another night, it was videos of influencers sitting on the beach, traveling to places she had never been, “in a competition of who’s doing better, who has this, who has that, who’s making more money, who’s right, who’s wrong …” until the night her life had brought her to DeSoto’s class, where he is now saying her name.
“Sorry,” she says to him, looking up. “What was the question?”
“What have you processed?”
“Um,” she says to DeSoto.
She talks about watching her speed and keeping distance from other drivers.
“Just overall trying to be more responsible,” she says.
“Very good,” DeSoto says, and Hailey returns to the workbook.
How do you define anger?
“Anger is a cover emotion …”
What emotions trigger anger?
“Fear, sadness, emptiness.”
After a few minutes, people begin to pack up their things. DeSoto wishes them luck and hands them each a certificate that will allow them to expunge the citations from their records.
They take out their car keys and their phones, and one by one, they begin to leave the classroom, headed back to highways full of anger and anxiety, until only one person is left seated.
Hailey, still writing.
Ruby Cramer is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post focused on writing narratives.
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