Teen pickup driver describes Texas tornado toss: 'Like a carnival game'

Remember the red Chevrolet Silverado caught in the tornado in Elgin, Texas, yesterday? The winds blew the truck over, spun it, then put the truck back on its wheels, and the driver hit the gas and drove off. According to Elgin television station KXAN, the driver left the truck in Elgin, which probably led to every local outlet camping in the bushes waiting for the driver to return. They found him, of course: 16-year-old Riley Leon.

In an interview with station KVUE, Leon said he was leaving a job interview in Elgin, missed two U-turns, then “out of nowhere, the tornado came in and it got me.” 

Leon told the TV reporter that the tornado had him in its grasp even before what we see in the video. “There was a ditch, and it took me there, and took me out and took me to the street, and that’s where I was spinning with the truck.” The twister flipped him over “like a carnival game, it was fast.”

Omg… just going thru my video. This is a story about a red truck and a tornado…. I CANNOT believe they drove away like that. #txwx #tornado pic.twitter.com/8h0nD88xFv

— Brian Emfinger (@brianemfinger)
March 22, 2022

He didn’t plan to drive away, either; he was only trying to get away from the worst of the wind, then hung around long enough to get assistance from an Elgin policeman and emergency medical personnel. The officer said Leon had “a scrape or some cuts on his left arm,” which the EMTs bandaged. “I asked if he was OK, and he shook his head and didn’t really answer me.”

But hey, he’s a teenager who accidentally ended up in a tornado (as opposed to the storm chasers who do it on purpose). We wouldn’t be shocked if he was still under the covers in his room in Manor, Texas, laying a thousand-yard-stare on the wall, instead of trying to give interviews about the experience.

Based on other tales of destruction in the area, caused by winds that reached up to 130 miles per hour, Leon got mighty lucky. The truck was worse off, he said, with “a lot of scratches, a lot of dents, but hopefully I’m going to work hard to fix it or buy a new one.” Hope he got that job in Elgin.