Man Tries And Fails To Tow His Broken Ford Three Times, Somehow Destroys A Restaurant Twice

This summer has been full of towing gone wrong. Back in May, a Ford Expedition sent a poor Saab 9-3 whipping around a Texas highway in a flat tow gone wrong. Later that month, I got a U-Haul stuck in mud after losing the key fob to a beautiful Ford F-350. Yet, I think I found it. Here’s the dumbest towing fail of the summer. Watch as a man straps a broken Mercury Montego to a broken Honda Pilot and fails so hard that an innocent Phở got obliterated twice in the process.

This news comes to us from the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office of Washington state, and the absolute mega failure of a disaster occurred on July 30 while stores weren’t open and folks were either sleeping or only just waking up for their day. Thankfully, this means that nobody got physically hurt. Instead, our victims here look to be what might have been a repairable Mercury Montego sedan and the UP Phở and Teriyaki of University Place, Washington. I feel very much for the owners of this establishment, as they seem to have some long days ahead of them.

Now, it would be easy to just laugh at the guy for his complete failure to tow a disabled car, but I’m going to take a different path here. I’m going to analyze this failure step-by-step and see what the person could have done here. Watch the video because it’s hilarious:

If At First You Don’t Succeed…

Our story starts off at around 5:44 p.m. on July 29. Security camera footage obtained by the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office shows a red Mercury Montego rolling through the parking lot and successfully stopping and parking at the AutoZone next to UP Phở and Teriyaki. The Sheriff’s Office says that the driver indicated that the vehicle was not driving properly and that they would return to tow the vehicle away. Alright, fair enough. I’ve been in that situation before.

The footage now spins over to July 30 at 3:41 a.m. as a white first-generation Honda Pilot appears on scene. The Pilot, which is rolling on a donut spare on its left rear side, is hitched up to a dolly.

The footage then rolls over to 5:13 a.m., suggesting that the driver had been wrenching and perhaps failed to fix whatever was wrong on the Ford. Confusingly, the driver of the Pilot doesn’t drive the Montego onto the dolly, but instead straps the car to the tongue of the dolly. As the Pilot and Montego pull away, a floor jack is left behind. The existence of the floor jack positioned where the Ford’s left front wheel was would have me thinking that there was a braking issue or perhaps a bad axle.

Anyway, it gets way worse from here, because the Honda Pilot’s pilot attempts to pull his rig out onto the road.

The image above is the parking lot on Google Street View. The lot itself sits on a gentle slope with the businesses on the bottom, but then the slope increases at the entrances to the lot. This is a terrible place to try to rescue a car out of all by yourself.

The Pilot driver’s strap setup works right up until he gets to the exit of the lot. Then, he stops because of cross traffic. Behind him, the Ford continues forward briefly, stops, rolls back, and then breaks the tow rope.

Oh, and a bunch of crap falls out of the guy’s tailgate while all of this was happening. The police don’t explain, but somehow, the Ford was able to be stopped and was abandoned at the parking lot entrance where the tow rope broke. If I had to guess, maybe someone was in the car and immediately threw it in park.

…Fail Again

Our hero returns at 5:50 a.m., and here’s where things get weird. The dolly is still attached to the Pilot, but now the front of the Pilot is facing the rear of the Ford. The police say that the man attempts to secure the car to the Honda again, but to my eyes, it looks like he’s trying to wrench on it one more time. You wouldn’t be hooking up a tow strap to the left front side where he was lying on the ground.

Either way, whatever he was doing failed when the car took off. Good ol’ gravity did its job and accelerated the car down the parking lot until the vehicle destroyed the entrance to UP Phở and Teriyaki. If you watch the video, you’ll see the guy hanging from the vehicle’s left mirror and hopelessly kicking his feet at the ground, hoping to achieve something. A well-equipped Mercury Montego weighs a little under 4,000 pounds, so whatever he was doing was a complete waste of time.

Amazingly, the doofus here is brazen enough to pull up in front of the destroyed restaurant with his broken Pilot. It’s here that we also get a look at his dolly, which doesn’t even have fenders or built-in straps. However, it clearly has ramps, spots to park the vehicle’s tires, and presumably, places to strap the wheels down.

Somehow, he manages to do something even dumber than his original towing attempt. This time, he fashioned a ridiculously long tow strap out of two or three tow straps knotted together into one mega strap. This works well enough to pull the Ford out of the restaurant, and save for piles of storefront glass on the hood, the Ford actually doesn’t look all that bad.

Now, you’d think our guy would stop and attempt to put the car onto the dolly, but I suppose he’s just trying to get out of there because, you know, he just destroyed a building. This time, he manages to get the Honda onto the road, but the Ford, which was probably about 45 feet or so behind the bumper of the Pilot, turns into the curb and shrubs at the entrance of the parking lot. The strap breaks again, and the Ford once again sails right into the entrance of UP Phở and Teriyaki.

This time, it appears the Ford slammed into a support column in front of the restaurant, saving the restaurant itself from a second direct hit.

Third Time’s A Charm?

Despite now failing twice in a row, the Honda guy still didn’t learn his lesson, and at 5:54 a.m., he hooks up to the Ford one more time, still using the extremely long strap. This time, a woman hops out of the Pilot and seemingly attempts to help the guy steer the Ford out of the lot. This, of course, fails. Using a tow strap was a dumb idea from the start, but a tow strap that’s over 40 feet long is even dumber. As you can see in the video, the Honda makes a complete turn while the Ford doesn’t even change directions.

First, the Ford almost slammed into the poor shrubs it had hit only a few minutes earlier, but the driver recovered, dragged the rear end over, and instead rammed the Ford into the retention wall and shrubs on the other side of the entrance. He doesn’t give up yet and pulls the car over the curb and shrubs, gets it across the parking lot, and then just abandons the car.

University Place deputies responded to the area only minutes later, at around 6 a.m., to find the Ford wedged into a parking space stop at the south end of the parking lot. The Honda Pilot pilot was nowhere in sight. Footage from the responding officer shows that the Ford had paint marker writing on its windshield. Perhaps the vehicle had only recently come from an auction or a junkyard sale. Sadly, it’s hard to make out what the markings said.

Police are looking for the suspect and the woman who was with him. Meanwhile, the owners of UP Phở and Teriyaki have a lot of damage to fix.

Update: A reader has pointed out that this car is not a Ford Five Hundred, but a Mercury Montego, the Ford’s rebadged upscale sibling!

So Many Ways To Have Done This Better

There are so many ways that this could have gone better. I’ve been in his position before. I’ve had a car break down on me, and either didn’t have the money to get it towed or thought I could tow it myself. I think this could have been successful with better planning.

If the car just didn’t have brakes, but still ran, he could have used gravity to his benefit. Park the Honda Pilot, siding uphill in the parking lot, and inch the Ford up the hill and onto the dolly. Then strap the car to the dolly and, as the kids say, “Bob’s your uncle.”

If the issue was that the axle was shot, that had a solution, too. Put someone in the car, fire up the engine, and pull it up the parking lot just far enough to get the Pilot in front of it. The person in the car can apply the brakes and put the vehicle in park if anything bad happens. Then, just use gravity to get the car onto the dolly.

If everything was broken, as in the car didn’t have brakes and didn’t start, I could see inching the car onto the dolly using a come-along winch, the wide array of straps that he already had, the woman he had along for the ride as an extra pair of hands, and some wheel chocks. A Harbor Freight was only 17 minutes from where this incident occurred, where he could have bought tools to make this recovery safer and easier. Of course, the Harbor Freight wasn’t going to be open at 5 a.m., and maybe the fella needed the car gone right then and there.

Either way, every single decision this guy made was the wrong one. I’ve been there before. It was only May when I made basically every incorrect decision after losing a press loaner truck’s key. But this one is somehow worse, because he destroyed a car and a business and then ran away, leaving everyone else to fix his mistake. It’s also a bit ridiculous because he tried to do the same thing three times, each failing spectacularly, and managed to crash into the same restaurant not just once, but twice.

Anyway, if you somehow happen to know who destroyed UP Phở and Teriyaki of University Place, Washington, both the authorities and the restaurant owner would probably be quite happy to find them. If you happen to get into a situation like this. Watch this video and don’t replicate anything that you’ve seen here.