News 8
Driver hit by soda cup traveling 130 mph 
07:27 PM CDT on Saturday, June 27, 2009
>Driving home from work, Marilyn Mackey didn’t know what hit her. Her windshield had suddenly exploded; she was covered in glass and liquid. Scared, she says, she thought someone had shot at her.
“It sounded like a shotgun,” the 61-year-old says.
The panic was caused not by a gunshot, but by a blast, so to say, from Sonic.
“I'm like, 'uh, what is it?' and he says, ‘a Styrofoam Sonic cup,’” she recalls.“And I’m like, ‘you're joking, a cup?' And he says, 'yeah, I don't believe it either, but there it is, there it is!’”
Mackey was driving home to Anna on State Highway 5 around 9:45 p.m. Sunday when, she says, the driver of a passing truck deliberately tossed a 44-ounce Sonic cup filled with soda at her car.
“There was blood. I had cuts on my arms and cuts around my eyes where the shattered glass got me,” she says. “The police said I was lucky I had my glasses on, because if not, I would have been in surgery having glass removed from my eyes.”
Immediately afterwards, she pulled over to call police and her husband.
Officers found fragments of the cup wedged into her windshield. The impact caused a softball-sized hole in the glass.
“I'm looking back at this and saying, this is incredible,” says Mackey’s husband, Dave, “did the guy have a beer bottle in it?”
The damage even surprised Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, a physics professor, at the University of Texas at Dallas.
“I thought there was no way, but when you do the calculations, it can,” Leslie-Pelecky says, after examining photos of the damage.
She says with two cars passing each other at 65-miles-per-hour, that two-pound cup was going 130-miles per hour when it slammed into the windshield.
The soda, she says, would have generated up to 120 pounds of force.
“It’s really a lot of heavier than you would think. A baseball, for example, is about a third of a pound,” Leslie-Pelecky says, adding the cup “is the equivalent to a bag of sugar. So we're not talking about something really light, we're talking about something pretty massive.”
Massive enough, Mackey feels, to seriously have injured her, if it landed a few inches over. She’s grateful she didn’t lose control of her Chevy Lumina.
“Most people wreck their car when they have that kind of trauma,” her husband says. “You could seriously, seriously hurt somebody and you might even be thinking about a Styrofoam cup with ice in it.”
Police are investigating but have little to go on, except knowing the driver was in a dark-colored truck.
Officers say the person could be charged with deadly conduct, a class C misdemeanor, that can include jail time.
Mackey had no idea why someone would throw a soda at her, but would certainly like to meet the person.
“I just believe in getting even, just bring me a windshield and I'll be glad to show him what it feels like,” she says, “paybacks are a you know what!”
E-mail jbetz@wfaa.com.
