Two dads are facing attempted murder charges for allegedly firing into each other’s vehicles on the highway.
The confrontation which occurred on Oct. 8 on a busy Florida highway, wounded each other’s daughters – who were passengers in their back seats.
Last week, William Hale, of Douglasville, Georgia, and Frank Allison, of Callahan, Florida, were charged with attempted second-degree murder in the incident on U.S. Highway 1 in Nassau County.
“Sometimes we see people acting stupid and doing dumb things out on the highway,” Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper said during a news conference last week. “They sometimes let their emotions get the best of them, and they don’t really think about the consequences of their actions or what could happen as the results of their stupidity.”
According to an incident report, a witness told deputies both vehicles were being driven so erratically and engaging in a “cat and mouse” chase that he called the authorities out of concern, local media reported.
The report added that Hale, driving a truck with relatives as passengers, told deputies that he and Allison were “brake checking,” or braking in front of each other repeatedly, during the confrontation. He said at some point, he heard a “pow” at his back door, so he grabbed a gun he kept in his center console and fired out of the driver’s window.
“It was an instant reaction,” Hale told deputies, adding that he fired “everything that was in the clip.”
Allison, on his part, told deputies that he fired his gun at the truck’s bed or tire after a water bottle was thrown into his car. Before the water bottle was thrown, his wife had been “flicking them off,” he said.
“Allison said his goal of firing the shot was to ‘get out of the whole situation,”’ the deputies reported.
According to the report, Hale’s 5-year-old daughter suffered a wound to her upper calf while Allison’s 14-year-old daughter suffered a collapsed lung.
“Thankfully, no one was killed in this incident, but it could have very easily turned out that way,” Leeper said. “There could have been two dead kids because of two stupid grown men.”
