Cell phone video captures apparent fight between driver and panhandler trying to wash windows

Cell phone video of an apparent fight between a driver and a panhandler man trying to wash windows off of I-35 is circling on social media leaving a lot of people wondering what lead up to it.

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The video was taken by a driver a few cars back during rush-hour traffic Thursday.

It started moments after a driver got out of his car on Northbound Frontage Road off of I-35 and East Anderson Lane under U.S. 183 around 4:30pm. The men were having some sort of verbal confrontation that quickly escalated when the driver grabbed the man throwing him in front of moving truck.

Veneza Bremner is a Senior Police Officer for the Austin Police Department, “It's dangerous all the time to even be driving in traffic, but when you're exiting your vehicle and getting into a disturbance with somebody you don't even know. There's a possibility of getting run over, which could've happened when they went into the turn lane and one pushed the other in front of a vehicle and he himself could've been hit by the same vehicle. It had potential for something being really serious,” she said.

The video captured up to the point the passenger moved over and drove away with the driver still there.

We found one of the men captured in the video, he said he simply asked the driver if he could wash his window, and the man got angry yelling at him not to touch his car. He said he never did actually touch the car, but the man got out cursing and was very upset.

The window washer said he's in that area often and if someone says no or ignores him he's respects them.

Something Bremner suggests when dealing with people on the side of the road. “Just ignore them. I drive through certain areas of town everyday not in police uniform, in my own vehicle and if you don’t want to interact with them, you just ignore them and for the most part they leave you alone,” she said.

Bremner said they are not investigating the case because they didn't receive a report until about three hours after it happened so there was no one at the scene and no victims came forward to report anything.