The 68-year-old Minneapolis resident says he was simply trying to take a shortcut home on Sunday when he pulled off the interstate, which often backs up at a tunnel near downtown.

But after exiting the Interstate 394, he saw that traffic was backlogged around the busy intersection of Lyndale and Hennepin avenues. He said he didn’t know why.

It turns out the driver had unwittingly driven into a massive pro-Palestinian protest.

He said he asked one of the protesters, “what the [expletive] is going on here?” and the young man tried to spit on him. The driver tried to go after the man, he said, but protesters converged on him, shot what he suspects was bear spray in his face, and hit him, he said.

Scared and confused, he grabbed a knife to defend himself, before fleeing the scene, he said.

In the wake of the incident, far-left activists have accused the driver of attacking peaceful protesters and trying to run them down with his car. One activist, a young city council candidate and rapper, urged his Instagram followers to “FIND THIS MAN!!” Left-wing media outlets have identified the driver as an “attacker” and a “malicious driver.”

Using video from the incident, and with the help of a Minneapolis criminal defense attorney, National Review has identified a man who claims to be the driver. He agreed to speak on the condition that his name not be released for safety reasons.

He said that when he pulled up on the scene, he had no intention of tangling with the activists, some of whom were carrying Hamas flags. He wasn’t a counter-protesters. He just wanted to go home. And he said he had no intention of running anyone down with his car — no one appears to have been seriously injured during the incident, though at least one protester told a local media outlet that her foot was run over in the encounter.

“Yeah, I drove through the crowd,” the driver said, “to get the hell out of there.”

The driver believes he is the victim, though he acknowledges he may not be the most sympathetic victim — he said that as a young man he was an alcoholic and a drug addict, he was convicted of several crimes, including kidnapping and stalking, and he served time in prison. But that was more than two decades ago, he said, and he’s since turned his life around.

Before he encountered the protesters on Sunday, the man said he spent time at the Running Aces Casino north of Minneapolis before stopping by a store in the western suburbs. He was driving east on I-394 on his way home around 3 p.m. when he decided to exit the interstate to avoid traffic that often backs up in a tunnel near the heart of downtown.

When he instead encountered traffic backed up from the protest, he assumed it may be related to a Minnesota Vikings football game. The Vikings played on Monday night this week, though he said he didn’t know that at the time.

He said he saw cars being used to block a section of road near a popular art museum and sculpture garden, and he saw people on a walking bridge holding pro-Palestinian signs.

He said he had the driver’s side window down in his 10-year-old Ford and asked one of the protesters “what the [expletive] is going on here?”

“And the guy tried to spit on me,” he said.

Looking back, he recognizes that it was a “real dumb thing to do,” but his instincts told him to go after the guy and “kick his ass,” he said. He got out of his car, but the crowd forced him back in. At one point, he said, someone doused him with what he suspects was bear spray.

“My whole face was burning and my eyes were burning. It was intense. It felt like it was on fire,” he said.

When he was back in his car, he said, he grabbed a knife he had “because I didn’t know what else was going to happen.” He said someone sucker punched him through the open window. He swiped at the person with his knife. “And I hit something,” he said. He doesn’t know what.

“My face was burning up. My eyes were burning up. And at some point I got out of the car, and I’m standing outside of the car with the knife in my hand,” he said of a scene captured on a brief video. “And there was a crowd there. And I had been hit, and I had mace sprayed in my face, and I didn’t know what was happening, or how it was going to happen, but if something else was going to happen, there were going to be some consequences.”

Drone footage from the far-left Minnesota media collective Unicorn Riot shows the driver’s white car at the intersection as a crowd of protesters gather around. The driver briefly exits his car, which seems to be continuing forward, and then gets back in. A mob of people, including at least one with a Hamas flag, surrounds the car, with at least one person kicking it.

The video shows the driver then attempting to maneuver the car through the crowd.

“I wanted to get the hell out of there,” he said. “I know that they described me that I drove through the crowd. And you know what, I started up my car and I stepped on the gas so that they would know that the car was running. I stepped on it and it made noise and the people backed off.”

He said he’s not sure how he got his car through the crowd, but he did. He then turned right, before running into the protesters’ roadblock of cars down the road.

The drone video shows several protesters chasing him on foot and with what appear to be motorcycles or all-terrain vehicles. They caught up with him at the roadblock.

“He’s not going nowhere now!” one of the activists yells as other protesters kicked the back of the car and the windows, and others hit the car with a flag pole bearing a Palestinian flag.

The driver said he could feel and hear people kicking his car. He could barely see at that point because of the bear spray or mace in his eyes.

“I had to hold my left eyelid open with my left hand and drive with my right hand, because I couldn’t see without doing that,” he said. He ended up pulling a u-turn and escaping toward downtown, with protesters in pursuit, video shows.

One video, which appears to have been posted on Instagram by city council candidate Zach Metzger (aka Lavish Mack), a far-left activist, racial justice protester, and aspiring rapper, urges followers to “FIND THIS MAN!!” In another video Metzger alleged that the “old man” was “attacking people who were using their First Amendment rights to stand with Palestine.”

Metzger claims he has received death threats because of his posts.

Attempts by National Review to reach Metzger on the phone and at his campaign email were unsuccessful on Wednesday. A man who answered a phone listed to Metzger online said that he was “out of state and he’s not here.” He declined to help National Review reach Metzger.

The protest on Sunday was organized by the Minnesota Anti-War Committee, the state’s chapter of the American Muslims for Palestine, and the University of Minnesota’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, according to media reports.

The Minneapolis Police Department has said there have been no reports of injuries related to the pro-Palestine demonstration, and no victims have come forward.

Aaron Rose, a police department spokesman, told National Review that there have been no arrests involving the incident with the driver, but there is an “open investigation that we are taking very seriously.”

The driver, who votes for Democrats, said he did not care that pro-Palestinian activists were protesting, though he is opposed to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israeli citizens.

“They can have their mind and do whatever they want to. I mean, this is America,” he said. “I’m not against them. Well, I wasn’t against them. Let’s say it like that.”

“I didn’t know there was a protest happening. I didn’t care about it, I don’t care about it,” he added. “They can make all the noise they want. They can tell the public all the lies they want.”

The driver questioned why there was virtually no police presence at the protest, or why tow trucks were not removing cars placed in the road to block traffic.

“I know that if I leave a car in the middle of the road, it’s going to get towed,” he said.

He said he didn’t call the police because “I don’t believe the police would have been sympathetic with me just because of who I am, because I have a criminal history.”

He said he remains angry, particularly about the damage to his car—he’d like to identify the people who kicked and hit his car so he can sue them.

He’s also worried about his safety. He said he’s replacing the license plates on his car because his plates were shown in videos. “I can’t have a gun, but if I could, I wouldn’t have bought plates, I would have gone and got some guns,” he said.

The driver said he doesn’t believe that the protesters were all peaceful, or that the protest was intended to be peaceful. “If this is a peaceful event, why does somebody have bear spray?” he asked. “And if it’s a peaceful event, why are they kicking my car? Why did the guy hit me, take a cheap shot while I’m sitting in the car?”

But the driver said there was at least one person in the crowd who helped him.

At one point early in the encounter, he said, his glasses fell off. When he was in his back in his car with the window down, “an arm came in and the guy had my glasses in his hand and he dropped them into my hand.” he said.

“And I just thought, they’re not all hateful people,” he said. “Just because, that guy didn’t have to do that. That was a really nice thing to do, because glasses are expensive.”

This is not the first recent encounter involving people driving through protests in Minnesota.

In June 2020, during the protests over George Floyd’s killing, the driver of a semi inadvertently drove into a crowd of protesters demonstrating on Interstate 35. When he stopped, protesters mobbed his truck and attacked him. Charges were dismissed against the driver.

A year later, a drunk driver in a sport utility vehicle drove into protesters who were demonstrating against a fatal police shooting in Minneapolis’ Uptown neighborhood. A woman was killed in the crash. The driver was sentenced to 20 years in prison.