Man recovering from Orlando road rage incident after being shot by motorcyclist
ORLANDO, Fla. - A man is recovering in the hospital after being shot in a road rage incident in Orlando.
Orlando Police say a road rage incident of some sort ended with a motorcyclist shooting someone in the arm through their car window. Police didn’t elaborate on what led up to the shooting, but said it happened around 9:00 p.m.
Thursday near Lake Underhill Road and Mercado Avenue.
FOX 35 News talked with several people around the neighborhood.
On this side of the street, multiple people told FOX 35 the area is quiet, and things like this don’t happen around here.
Across the street though, a man named Frank Morris said this was just the most recent shooting in the area, and he was a witness to others.
"It’s scary, it’s weird. Nobody wants to be near something like that," said Morris.
This is only the most recent road rage incident FOX 35 has covered.
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Someone was arrested for slashing a family’s tires after a road rage incident in Winter Garden last Friday.
Police are still looking for someone who shot two men on I-4 after they flashed their brights last Wednesday.
The week before that, a 26-year-old was arrested for killing someone on Colonial Drive after the driver cut him off.
FOX 35 also talked with a psychologist about what motivates people to this level of anger. Dr. Peter Hancock is a professor of psychology at UCF. He says it takes a combination of factors to push someone to the point that they hurt someone because of road rage.
The first condition is what Dr. Hancock called a "high arousal condition" where people are hyper-aware of their environment. The second factor is what Dr. Hancock says is a "negative valence" where something aversive is happening.
"The real problem, we find, is that when you're in those two combined conditions, your performance isn't very good. Your things like your control performance, but also your own self-control, diminished quite a lot, and you just make bad judgments," Dr. Hancock described.
Dr. Hancock described road rage as a "significant problem."
"When you get to this threshold, it isn't like sort of you get a sort of slow degradation, a slow burn. It's you're okay, you're okay. No, you're not okay. And so it's the sort of over the edge of the cliff. And then that's where you start doing can start doing irrational things."
In this most recent case on Lake Underhill Road, the driver was hit in the arm. He’s going to be okay.
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Of course, "okay" in that sentence is relative. He’ll still have to spend quite a bit of time healing, both physically and mentally.
Dr. Hancock says if you find yourself getting worked up on the road, try to do some deep breathing, pull over or away to remove yourself from the situation if you can, and consider possible consequences if you act on your anger.
"You have to try and ask yourself, ‘Is it worth it? Is it worth me getting upset about that person to that extent?’"