Upset at being refused a ride by a taxi, a 28-year-old went on a rampage this morning, hurtling a bar stool through the cab’s window and chasing its driver around his car.
Watching the incident in Tsim Sha Tsui unfold, bystanders called it correctly.
“He’s going to go to jail,” someone can be heard muttering in a video of the mayhem, uploaded to Facebook and re-published by Apple Daily.
According to Apple Daily, the altercation happened at around 2:42am this morning when a taxi –driven by a 41-year-old man surnamed Ho — stopped at the junction between Chatham Road South and Hart Avenue.
A 28-year-old man surnamed Lee — dressed in white — hailed the cab and the driver, but was rejected by Ho.
The pair quarrelled for a bit and then Lee went to a nearby bar, grabbed a bar stool, and started hitting the cab, smashing the taxi’s window while Ho remained inside.
With the stool thrown inside the vehicle, Ho then gets out of the taxi while on the phone with the police and is chased by Lee, as startled observers watch on.
Lee then gets into the driver’s seat and then throws the stool out of the window at Ho, who tells the aggressor not to touch anything, while he continues to speak on the phone with police.
Lee then moves to the passenger seat where he asks the driver “why won’t you take me?” — almost a rhetorical question at that point, you’d have to assume.
Officers arrived at the scene shortly afterwards to arrest Lee on suspicion of criminal damage.
Taken to the hospital by police, he got a ride after all.
The Transport Complaints Bureau, according to its most recent statistics, received a total of 2720 reports about taxi services in the last quarter of 2017. The figure marked a 6.8 percent drop from the previous quarter, though represented a 2.8 percent rise compared to the same quarter in 2016.
Some 97 percent of the cases related to “driver malpractice”, which included cabbies, refusing fares, improper driving behaviour, overcharging, meter irregularities and failure to take the most direct route.
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