Arrest made after truck driver wounded in Abington Twp. road rage shooting
Police say the victim was hit in the head with a gun, and that's when the gun went off.
ABINGTON TWP., Pennsylvania (WPVI) -- A man has been arrested for a road rage incident in Abington Township, Montgomery County on Wednesday that left a truck driver injured.
Scott Thomas, of the 5500 block of Ardleigh Street in Philadelphia, is charged with aggravated assault and related offenses.
It happened around 8:20 a.m. at The Fairway and Rydal Road.
Police say Thomas, 21, was behind the wheel of a white van when he pulled in front of a Pepsi delivery truck and approached the truck driver "in an aggressive manner."
There was a struggle, and police say the truck driver was hit in the head with a gun.
That's when the gun then went off, and the bullet grazed the truck driver's hip.
Thomas fled in the white van, police say, but he was located by police around 10 a.m. at Rodman Ave. near Old York Road.
He was taken into custody without incident.
Lt. Steven Fink of the Abington Police Department said the most disturbing part of this shooting is that incidents like these are no longer unusual.
"This is something, I'm sad to say, is becoming more and more common with the gun violence that we're hearing about. The number of guns our officers are taking off the streets, the criminals they're encountering with these guns, it's something I've seen double in the last couple of years," Fink said.
The truck driver was taken to Abington Jefferson Hospital where he was treated for minor injuries.
Thomas is being held on $99,000 bail.
Coincidentally, this happened the same day suburban district attorneys from across the Delaware Valley held a news conference to announce the region's participation in the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, better known as NIBIN.
It involves tracing signature markings from shell casings found at crime scenes.
Those markings help investigators from across the country trace the use of individual guns used in the commission of crimes.
"There has been over six million pieces of ballistic evidence that's been entered into the system and over 722,000 investigative leads that I've been given to investigators to combat violent crime," said Eric DeGree of the ATF in Philadelphia.
The NIBIN system is already up and running in the Delaware Valley.
