Fort Lauderdale Man Caught on Camera Cutting the Brakes on Electric Scooters
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The controversial e-scooters beginning to dot the landscape of cities and towns around the country apparently got one Fort Lauderdale, Florida resident so irate that he decided to cut the brakes on some of them.
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Fort Lauderdale man caught by Ring doorbell cutting brakes
The Fort Lauderdale police department arrested Randall Thomas Williams, a 59-year-old resident, this week after he was caught on camera cutting the brakes. The man snuck out in the wee hours of the night armed with wire cutters and got busy vandalizing the e-scooters. Willimas act was captured on a Ring doorbell, which the police posted on YouTube.
"On September 29th, the Fort Lauderdale Police Department arrested an individual in the act of tampering with several electric scooters. Further investigation revealed a total of 20 scooters were located nearby with severed brake lines," the police said in a statement posted online. "Anyone who witnesses someone tampering with electric scooters should call 911
immediately. Additionally, anyone who finds a scooter that appears to have been tampered with should contact the vendor."
Man charged with a third-degree felony count of criminal mischief
Willimas was charged with a third-degree felony count of criminal mischief. The police have been investigating about 140 incidences in which the brakes were cut on e-scooters since April. Twenty of the e-scooters were located where Willimas was arrested. According to one media report, the Fort Lauderdale resident caused about $1,400 in damage to Lime e-scooters. He was released on a $500 bond. Williams has not said what his motive was.
While e-scooters are hugely popular with millennials who want a greener and cheaper way to get from point A to point B, they are not void of critics. The hatred for these transportation tools has even spawned an Instagram page: scootersbehavingbadly.
It doesn't help that in April the Centers for Disease Control released a report after studying e-scooters in use in Austin, Texas for 87 days and identified 271 people who were injured using the e-scooters. The majority occurred in the street with 29% involving first-time riders and 18% involving a motor vehicle. The e-scooter injury rate calculated by the CDC was 14.3% per 100,000 trips in Austin.
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