CLEVELAND -- A man whose windshield was shattered by a rock, chased down the kids who dropped it onto his van.
"It was either I ran them down, or I ended up paying for the windshield." That's how matter of factly Rob Liuzzo described his hunt for the two teenagers who dropped a chunk of concrete on his van from the West 25th overpass over Interstate 71.
"I was northbound on 71, and saw a kid with a white sleeveless shirt and one in gray on the bridge," Liuzzo recalls of the incident which happened Monday evening about 7 p.m.
"I saw their arms through the hole in the fence, and I seen two things coming at me," Liuzzo, who owns a carpet cleaning business with his brother, continued. "So I just swerved to the left and I didn't know if I was going to miss them at all. I missed one but the other came through the windshield."
Covered with shards of glass, Liuzzo pulled over and called his brother, who was about a minute ahead of him in another vehicle. Then he decided to go after the pair since he'd gotten such a good look at them.
"That's him. That's my brother," said Ron Liuzzo. "I mean panic first, but then everything kicks in and he says let's go back and find them at least."
Rob Liuzzo got off at West 14th, turned around by Steelyard Commons, and came back south on I-71, exiting at West 25th. He headed north in hopes of spotting the two rock throwers. A few blocks away he saw them.
"They were just walking down the street like nothing happened," Liuzzo remembered.
He got police on the phone and kept up the pursuit, finally flagging down a patrol car to the exact spot where the two were walking.
"They asked me to ID them so I went over there," Liuzzo said. "I seen the cutoff shirt. I seen the guy in the gray shirt. He handcuffed them. They didn't really say anything to me, just like, guilty."
The brothers were back to the family business, See Our Cleaning, by Monday morning, but Rob knows how bad it could have been had he not swerved.
"I could have been killed. Yeah, that's what they told me."
And Ron Liuzzo realized that if he'd been in the passenger seat as he usually was, he could have been blinded, or worse.
As for the two 17-year-olds, they were taken into police custody and charged with felonious assault and criminal damaging.
"I couldn't let them get away with it," Liuzzo said.
WKYC-TV