PRAIRIEVILLE, La. (AP) — A man accused in a violent road rage attack that hospitalized a Louisiana man is in custody, authorities said Thursday.
Ascension Parish sheriff's deputies said Bryan Cage, 37, of Zachary, surrendered shortly after detectives received a warrant for his arrest, The Advocate reported.
Scott Gray, 59, an air conditioner and heating repairman from Prairieville, told authorities he was headed home from a Sunday evening job when the side mirror of his large work pickup truck clipped the mirror of a truck headed in the other direction. He said he slowed down and pulled over as close as he could to the ditch edge along the narrow, shoulder-less road, but he says he couldn’t avoid the inevitable collision.
Gray said he didn't expect the ferocious reaction of the other driver after they began to talk. As they discussed possible payment, the man sucker-punched him and knocked him out, Gray alleged.
“He just said, ‘You’re going to pay for that mirror,’” Gray said. “And I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And my lights went out. That was it.”
Based on his previous experience with narrow Ascension roads that he called “a big problem,” Gray told the newspaper that he was only trying to tell the man that their respective insurance companies would likely have assumed the repair costs.
Gray didn’t regain consciousness until after deputies and an ambulance had arrived around 8 p.m. Sunday.
The beating sent Gray to hospital with facial fractures and damage to his eye, which was swollen shut for a time, and to a tear duct. He had surgery on the duct but expects to need another for the triangular-shaped fractures in his cheek bone once the swelling goes down.
Gray has stage four cancer and lost a leg in a motorcycle accident about 20 years ago. He was walking on his prosthetic leg at the time of the crash and beating, he said.
The Ascension Parish Sheriff's Office distributed surveillance camera video of the black F-150 pickup that Gray and witnesses said his attacker was driving. Detectives later were able to identify Cage as a suspect with unspecified law enforcement technology, the sheriff's office said.
After he surrendered, Cage was transported to the Ascension Parish Prison where he is awaiting arraignment on a felony count of second-degree battery and hit-and-run driving, a misdemeanor. It was unknown if he is represented by an attorney who could speak on his behalf.
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