Man repeatedly crashes truck into Dallas TV station building
A man repeatedly rammed a pickup truck into the building of a Dallas television station on Wednesday morning, shattering floor-to-ceiling windows during the station's morning newscast, in what the police called an intentional act.
After slamming into the downtown Dallas building at about 6 a.m., the man exited the truck and began yelling and throwing paper into the air, according to the station, KDFW-TV, a Fox affiliate. Before the police arrived, the driver held photos and handwritten notes up to one of the building's windows.
"He kept yelling, 'High treason!'" Brandon Todd, a reporter at the station, said on air. "He believed he had been clearly wronged and was trying to get some attention."
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No one was hurt, the police said.
The police said that the driver, whose name has not been publicly released, was taken to a hospital for a "medical evaluation" and would be charged and booked into jail later in the morning. A spokeswoman at the Dallas Police Department said that officers were still trying to determine his motivations and his apparent grievances.
"The officers said he was rambling and saying all kinds of nonsense," the spokeswoman, Senior Corporal Debra Webb, said at a news conference. "It appears he was in some sort of agitated mental state."
A video from the station showed the man removing paper from a duffel bag and from boxes in the back of the truck. He also stacked a pile of documents outside a door to the building.
"We just saw police running inside and saying, 'Get to the other side of the building,'" Shannon Murray, a reporter who was inside the newsroom at the time of the crash, said on the station's morning news show. "It wasn't clear what the man's intentions were. He was yelling and trying to show us something."
Mr. Todd said he could not understand everything the man was saying or what was written on the documents. But the man mentioned a sheriff's department and said that someone had been injured, Mr. Todd said.
The crash occurred during a time of heightened security and concern in newsrooms across the United States over anti-press rhetoric and attacks on the news media. In June, five people were killed in a shooting at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Md. Last week, the F.B.I. charged a California man who was accused of threatening to kill employees of The Boston Globe. In a phone call to the paper, the man said, "You're the enemy of the people" — echoing the frequent attack line used by President Trump.
Mr. Todd said it appeared that the driver did not want to hurt anyone. The man told onlookers that he decided to crash into the station in the early morning because he assumed few people would have been inside the building.
The Fox station continued to broadcast its morning news show during the crash, and the show's anchors later said on air that they were unaware the episode had taken place because they could not hear it.
Most employees in the newsroom evacuated the building after the episode while the broadcast continued from a secure location, the station said. The police blocked off streets around the building for several hours while a Police Department bomb squad investigated the man's duffel bag, which was left at the scene, and his truck. Sr. Cpl. Webb said that officers found no explosives.