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A man in Northeast D.C. who was walking his dog Monday afternoon came across a situation that he never expected to see.
Right in front of him, at 13th and C streets, three suspects approached a silver car that had been idling on the side of the road and tried to forcibly steal the car from the driver.
“It’s a frightening experience,” said Brian Beaty, who pulled out his phone and captured some of the incident on video.
According to a D.C. police report obtained by WTOP, one of the suspects opened the driver’s side door and tried to pull the driver out of the vehicle as he was calling for help.
The suspect punched the driver “repeatedly” in the face with a closed fist, police said.
That is when a community member who was not involved in the incident ran over to the scene and kicked that suspect “in the chest,” Beaty explained.
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“There was a scuffle between that individual and this man in the middle of the street,” Beaty said.
During the altercation, Beaty’s video showed one of the other suspects going over to a nearby black car and retrieving a golf club from it.
The suspect walked toward the scuffle in the street and seemed to hold the club in a threatening way, but it all came to an end soon after that.
The three suspects walked away, went back to the black car and drove off.
“It could have gone a lot worse we saw when that one assailant pull out the golf club,” Beaty said. “The situation started to become very escalated, and that’s exactly what you don’t want to happen.”
Later Wednesday, D.C. police announced one of the suspects — a 13-year-old girl — had been arrested.
Carjackings have been sharply on the rise in the nation’s capital.
According to the latest figures from D.C. police, motor vehicle thefts are up 114% right now compared to the same time last year.
“The video shows that the community is definitely sick of this,” Beaty said. “You can tell everybody is pretty fed up with this recurring problem that’s happening in and around our community.”