Insets (from top to bottom): Dylan Martinez and Christina Martinez (WRC/YouTube). Background: The Martinezes’ vehicle after an object was thrown at it (WRC/YouTube).
A family of four and their friends were driving home after a day of celebration in Virginia when they say two people on an overpass hurled a large object at their SUV, shattering the windshield and nearly killing everyone in the car.
Dylan and Christina Martinez believe the incident could have been fatal.
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Not long after midnight on Monday, the couple was driving their SUV on Dulles Greenway in Loudoun County, Virginia. The area is in northern Virginia, just west of Washington, D.C.
They had just spent the day in Leesburg at a get-together for Labor Day, the Martinezes told regional NBC affiliate WRC. They had their two young children in the vehicle, as well as two friends.
“One second you’re doing a sing-along with your kids who just got to stay up late with their friends and everything,” Dylan Martinez said, before describing what happened next. “Next thing you know, the windshield explodes.”
The couple said they saw two people standing on the Sycolin Road overpass before something large was thrown. The object — possibly a rock or piece of concrete — hit the hood of their SUV before bouncing onto the windshield, shattering it.
Video taken by the TV station shows a massive dent in the hood of the vehicle, and then the broken windshield, which sent “glass shards everywhere,” as Dylan Martinez described it.
Still, he suspects that if the item was thrown a fraction of a second later, the suspect “could’ve killed six people.”
“I’d definitely be dead,” the father added. “If they would’ve held it even more and, God forbid, it went through the sunroof where our kids and our friends were, I mean, it could’ve been really bad.”
The Martinezes pulled their SUV over to the side of the road and called 911.
The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to Law&Crime that the Virginia State Police (VSP) responded to the area because of “a report of a rock hitting a vehicle after being thrown from an overpass.” Deputies with the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office arrived at the scene at about 12:55 a.m. on Monday to assist troopers.
VSP has not announced any arrests or persons of interest in the case.
“We don’t care about the car. The car can be fixed,” Christina Martinez said. “I care about my kids and my family, and that could’ve easily ended someone’s life. So at the very least, obviously, we’re trying to find information. But I also want to make sure people are talking to their kids about this, using this as a tool to kind of have those conversations at home and make sure that this isn’t the next TikTok trend.”
After they pulled over, the couple said they saw another vehicle behind them appear to be hit by a rock thrown from the same overpass. That driver, too, managed to pull over and did not appear to be physically hurt.
Law&Crime has reached out to VSP for more information.
The post Family doing ‘sing-along’ on way home from celebration watches people on overpass drop large rock onto SUV before the windshield ‘explodes’: Police first appeared on Law & Crime.
