ANDERSON, SOUTH CAROLINA — Ralph Duroy recalled that the 1988 Nissan truck parked in his driveway was first passed down by his step-father.
“Just before he died in 2000, he passed it on to me. It has sentimental value,” he said in an interview with WSPA.
Unfortunately, another man had foolishly decided that Duroy’s ’88 Nissan would be the perfect escape vehicle. According to WSPA, police cited 25-year-old Rusty Seawright with attempting to steal Duroy’s truck from his driveway. Duroy, however, had reasonable objections to this.
“He was frantic when he saw me coming,” said Duroy. “He was almost hyperventilating.”
That’s because Duroy stepped outside with his old trusty revolver levelled at the man’s head. While Seawright apparently had successfully gained entrance to the vehicle and hot-wired it, he hadn’t even made it out of the driveway before he was staring down the barrel of a gun.
Seawright made the right call. He got out of the vehicle and got onto the ground. While Duroy’s wife made the call to police, Duroy took the opportunity to try to calm the man down and get a conversation going about what direction Seawright’s life was heading.
“We got along very well actually, considering,” said Duroy as he laughed in his interview with WSPA.
When police arrived, they realized Seawright had crashed his vehicle not too far away and had abandoned it. He had come to Duroy’s property to attempt to requisition his ride only to be met with resistance. Thankfully, Seawright was able to make a good decision in a sea of bad ones and surrender peaceably. South Carolina police have charged him with failing to report striking fixtures on highway, and two counts of petty larceny.
The truck’s damages are estimated to be around $700 due to Seawright’s busting of the window and the steering column. That may just be the face value of that Nissan truck but Duroy said it was a vehicle with sentimental value. Let’s hope Seawright learned a bigger life lesson than it’s not okay to steal.
