A 16-year-old boy caught in a tornado last week in Elgin, Texas, received a new truck after online video footage went viral.
On March 21, a line of severe storms moved through Texas, spawning tornadoes along the way.
One of these storms was filmed moving across Highway 290 in Elgin. In the video, a tornado flips a red Chevrolet truck on its side, spinning it. The vehicle appears to turn over again through the dust and debris, this time right side up.
The driver, Riley Leon, was on his way home from a job interview at Whataburger. Leon knew the weather would likely get severe, but he did not want to miss the job opportunity.
An eleventh-grade student, Leon told interviewers that he was not sure how to react when he realized that his vehicle was in the middle of a tornado’s funnel.
“I honestly didn’t know what to do, to grab onto the steering wheel or to start praying,” he said to NBC 5.
Leon also mentioned that the video appears to show him driving away in the truck, but after he landed in the center of the road, he only traveled far enough to get off of the highway. “On the video, it looks like I drove off, but in reality, I didn’t. I landed in the center of the road, and I was just driving to get off the road.”
The teen was saddened to see the damage to the truck, noting that “It broke me down seeing my hard work is gone. [The truck] is family-owned, but my dad passed it to me, but I paid him off.”
Just two days after the tornado, Bruce Lowrie Chevrolet, a Fort Worth dealership, announced that it would be gifting a 2022 Chevrolet Silverado to Leon.
The sales manager at Bruce Lowrie heard about the young man’s harrowing experience, and the dealership decided to gift Leon with a new truck worth $50,000. He headed to the sales lot on March 26 to receive his new wheels.
With his new truck, he now has transportation for his new job at Whataburger.
