RICHMOND, Va. (WTVR)- If you wondered how a Virginia State Trooper can drive quickly up onto a sidewalk beside a Virginia Commonwealth University dorm, hit a skateboarder and not face serious charges, all you have to do is meet the skateboarder himself.
Tim Crawford is a 17-year-old Richmonder with some refreshingly old-fashioned values. While it would be cool if he could make some kind of career skateboarding, he said, Tim’s dream is to be a herpetologist.
He never dreamed of trying to profit from his few famous seconds on the hood of a trooper’s car – a few seconds that was captured on video that has gotten hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube.
“It was really fast,” Tim recalled Friday while taking a break from his restaurant job at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “I went up on the hood and I was like, ‘Wow! I’m on the hood of the car right now.’ I don’t remember falling to the ground. I just remember being back up on my feet.”
“My first split-second reaction was anger, because it felt really intentional,” Tim added. “He came right at me.”
But once he realized a skateboarding companion had filmed the whole thing, “I was laughing. I’m like, ‘This is ridiculous and this is going to make golden footage.”
Indeed, it’s part of his crew’s new skateboarding movie, “Unplanned Pregnancy.”
He said the officer was concerned about whether he was injured, although Tim wondered why he asked him to walk to a nearby alley to exchange information.
“I think there was some fear in his eye,” he said. “Like, it was the first time I ever talked to a cop and I felt like I had the power in the situation.”
He believes if a citizen had done what the trooper had done, there would’ve been a reckless driving arrest at the least. And if a citizen had run onto a sidewalk and hit a police officer, Tim wonders if the driver might’ve been fired upon.
Still, he was willing to just walk – or skateboard – away.
“I’m not the type of person to hold too much anger or anything. Like, I’m okay with it,” he said. “I was fine. I didn’t want to sue. A lot of people told me I need to sue, but I never wanted to do that from the start. I mean, people need to be careful, but accidents do happen. And if you’re okay, then like why try to benefit on something at someone else’s expense?”
