A Northern California driver was left bloodied and nearly blinded Thursday night after a frozen water balloon smashed through his windshield and struck him in the face, authorities said.
The bizarre incident happened on Highway 20 near Hallwood Boulevard in Marysville.
California Highway Patrol investigators believe someone traveling in the opposite direction hurled the makeshift projectile from a moving car.
“It came through the window and hit me in the face,” said Alex Plant, who recounted the terrifying moment to KCRA-TV. “Forced a lot of this glass into my face, in my eyes.”
Plant said he was driving home from work around 9:30 p.m., going roughly 45 miles per hour, when something flashed before his eyes and exploded through the windshield.
“I barely saw it for a quarter of a second before it just came straight through,” he said.
The impact stunned Plant, who said he veered onto the shoulder of the two-lane highway.
Disoriented and bleeding, he asked Siri on his phone to call 911 because his eyes were swelling shut and he couldn’t see the screen.
“My eyes were already starting to close up, so I couldn’t even look at the phone if I wanted to,” he told the station.
When first responders arrived, they found a piece of white balloon embedded in the shattered glass, which indicated that the object had been frozen solid before it was thrown.
Paramedics rushed Plant to a nearby hospital, where doctors spent hours removing glass shards from his face and eyes.
Despite visible cuts and swelling, Plant spoke with reporters with both eyes open, though he said his vision was still blurry.
“I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to see my family, to be honest with you,” Plant said. “It was really stressful.”
“Out of this right eye, if I were to close the left one right now, you know, everything’s a little bit blurry. It’s hard to focus a little bit. And like I said, just the sensitivity to light.”
Plant told the station he can’t understand why anyone would go to such lengths to inflict harm on a random driver.
“I was a random victim, but somebody didn’t randomly do this act, right?” he said. “Somebody went through all that trouble to, like, freeze it, tie it off, you know what I mean?”
“And then throw it through the windshield before it defrosted. That’s just crazy. Somebody went through all of that for just a random act of violence.”
Investigators with the California Highway Patrol are asking anyone who saw suspicious activity along Highway 20 that night to come forward. Authorities said they currently have no witnesses or vehicle descriptions.
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Meanwhile, police in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, are investigating a similar act of roadside danger.
Officials said a minor threw a chunk of concrete off a highway overpass in Doylestown, striking a moving car and shattering its windshield.
The incident occurred last Friday on the northbound lanes of Route 611, beneath the Dublin Pike overpass.
The piece of concrete crashed through the car’s windshield, but the driver and passengers escaped injury, investigators said.
Police described the suspect as a young male about 5-foot-7 with long dark hair, wearing a dark beanie and jacket.
He was seen with two other juveniles running toward East Sandy Ridge Road on Old Dublin Pike after the impact.
“This highly dangerous incident led to property damage without injury to the driver,” police said in a statement, adding that anyone found responsible could face serious criminal charges.
Authorities have warned that even small objects thrown from overpasses can become deadly projectiles at highway speeds.
In another case of reckless roadway behavior, a Colorado woman captured frightening dashcam footage in September that showed an object being hurled from a moving truck and striking her windshield in the Denver suburbs.
Shannon Anderson told reporters she was driving home on East Dry Creek Road near South Clarkson Street in the Southglenn neighborhood just before noon when she saw something tossed from a pickup truck window.
“It was very impactful — loud. Boom. Cracked the windshield. It just really shook me up,” she said.
Anderson believes the object was a Dairy Queen cup, but not an empty one.
“I’m assuming there were rocks or something heavy inside because of the damage and the sound it made,” she said. “It couldn’t have just been a drink cup — it was a small one, and it couldn’t have held much.”
She filed a report with the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, which confirmed at least one other similar complaint that same day in the southern Denver metro area.
“They told us she thought maybe rocks were thrown at her windshield,” Anderson said of another motorist.
“Her windshield cracked through, and it hurt her hand or hands. There was more damage to her than to myself.”
