How does a man fall asleep on top of a car trunk, and stay that way as the vehicle winds down 14 miles of highway? Better question: How does the driver not even see this? Tennessee man Carl Webb supplied a possible answer after an incident last Thursday, according to WFTV.
He told the outlet he and his wife had left the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest in Memphis. It was dark out, and the sunshade was up so they didn’t know the man passed out on their trunk. So Webb drove, he said. Fourteen miles, like that, in a car with a trunk 14 inches wide.
You get absolutely no brownie points for guessing a cop pulled them over.
“The officer came up and he said, ‘Mister, are you aware there’s a body on your trunk?’, and that did not register,” Webb told the outlet. “He goes, ‘Mister, I’m not messing with you. There’s a body on your trunk.’ So I got out. We walked around and sure enough, there he was still hanging on, still unconscious, just lying there.”
The officer woke the man up. Webb said this individual was drunk, stumbling into traffic so the cop had to pull him back.
The Memphis Police Department told LawNewz.com that a man did actually fall asleep on the Webbs’ car trunk. The officer was driving on Interstate 240 when he “observed a huge object that appeared to be a human being on the back of a black Ford Taurus that was going approximately 65 miles per hour,” cops said. Upon closer inspection, he saw that it was a human being.
The police statement matches up with Webb’s side of the story: There was a traffic stop; the couple thought the officer was joking about the sleeping man, but no, he was serious; and then he woke up the individual, who “had no idea where he was and the last thing he remembered was being at Memphis in May.” They said he was later released.
The Memphis Police Department also said that by making this traffic stop, the officer, Benjamin Huff, “prevented a tragedy that would have resulted in serious bodily injuries or could have easily been fatal.”
Update – May 25, 1:46 p.m.: We added the statement from police.
[Screengrab via Hillary Kett]
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
