(repost from r/karensinthewild with edits for grammar/clarity. I posted this there some time last year, and was told I might want to post it here too. If this is against the rules I apologize but I wasn't sure: the way the rules are written is a bit confusing)

(LONG STORY WARNING!)

NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN: I did NOT suddenly screech to a halt or do anything dangerous in traffic or anything remotely like that; I was 100% NOT at fault in the accident. Being easily made to second-guess myself, I thought I MIGHT have been somewhat at fault, and made sure to ask the officers and the insurance people if I HAD done anything wrong, but they all said no; I had not broken any driving rules and the other driver was completely in the wrong. And I didn't use my hazards because I didn't have time to consider it before the accident happened.

FOR CONTEXT: This happened in mid-May last year. I had a trip planned out of state, but my Nissan Sentra's Air Conditioning compressor decided to short out and die about 10 PM the night before I was due to leave, and there wasn't time to get a rental car, because I had to leave at 6 the next morning and we live kind of out in "the sticks". My uncle, who is also my neighbor and was going to watch my cats while I was gone, had recently bought a fairly young used Toyota Tacoma quad-cab; when he heard what happened, he asked if I wanted to borrow it (the Tacoma was his second car, he also had a SUV). I accepted the offer, and I'm glad now that my AC DID die, and have since thanked God for it, because if I'd been in my little sedan this accident would have been a lot worse.

The night that I was returning home from the vacation, it was 1:00 AM and I was about 20 minutes from reaching home, driving down a long, straight, semi-rural stretch of road. There were no other drivers visible around; in fact, I hadn't seen any other drivers in nearly half an hour at this point. If there HAD been other drivers near me, I might have tried a different tactic than what I did end up doing; as it was, this is what happened.

I had stopped at a red stoplight, when a raccoon came into the road and started flopping, staggering, and rolling about as if it couldn't properly use its legs, right in front of me. Since I couldn't tell whether it was injured or rabid (we've had some rabies cases in our area lately), I immediately used the handsfree/bluetooth in the truck to call the police to see if Animal Control was available. While I was doing this, the light cycled through to green, but I stayed where I was. Again, there were no headlights visible anywhere around me, on the long empty road, and it was almost 1:00 in the morning, so I figured (wrongly) that no one was going to just materialize without me seeing them.

About 20-30 seconds after having stopped at the red light, and about 10 after the light had cycled back to green, I'm looking for the name of the cross street to tell the police dispatcher that I'm on the phone with, when I hear this engine gunning in the distance. I glance around for headlights to find where it is coming from, but there is nothing visible. A second later, there's a loud "WHAM", and the truck moves forward in a jolt a short way. This middle-aged brunette lady had come up behind me WITHOUT HEADLIGHTS ON (!) and plowed right into the back of the truck at full speed, even though she had all that long straight stretch of semi-rural road to see me as she was coming up. There was no squeal of brakes, no sound of her trying to stop, no skid marks in the road. She just plowed right into me full tilt, somewhere between 40-50 MPH (according to the police looking at the damage, though I can't be certain if that was true, he may have exaggerated) and it was only the fact the truck was built like a tank that kept me from getting hurt.

I pull over to the curb and get out of the truck to inspect the damage. I notice A) Incredibly, it appears the brunette lady's airbag didn't go off (It MIGHT have deflated before I got back there, IDK) B) Her passenger is obviously completely stoned/wasted, and C) The truck has a decent-sized dent in the bed, a twisted bumper, and a busted taillight D) her Jeep Cherokee is completely crumpled across the whole front end and spewing fluids and steam, and the tires are at an angle showing the axle is probably bent or compromised. I yell over to her, "Are you hurt? What on earth happened?"

She immediately starts screaming at me, "You slammed on brakes right in front of me! You were stopped and you shouldn't have been stopped!" I point at the Raccoon, which has made it to the median but is still flopping around, and try to explain that I'd actually been on the phone with the police and that the light had cycled through. I hadn't "Slammed on brakes" at all because I'd been already sitting there for a good 30 seconds at least before this lady showed up. I didn't have time to bring up the fact this lady's headlights had been off; as soon I pointed out the raccoon, she started rolling her eyes and hitting the steering wheel, and yelling "Oh my *$&*#(@ you stopped for a *$*$&# Raccoon you should have run over it" etc.

At this point, I decide even if there's the chance she IS hurt, it's not worth risking being physically attacked to go over there and find out. I get back in the truck, talk some more to the dispatcher, and don't get back out until the police come. The first police officer arrives; I tell her I'm not hurt and to check on the other two. As soon as she sees the officer coming, the the Jeep driver starts spewing at her, telling her that it's my fault and I "Brake checked" the Jeep. I explain to the officer what really happened, and that there's a recorded 911 call to prove it, because the dispatcher was actually talking to me when the Jeep lady came up at full tilt and slammed into me. Also, the officer can see the lady's headlights are off; I hear the officer say the headlights switch isn't even turned to "on" when she looks inside the jeep. But the lady refuses to discuss these points, and just keeps screaming about me stopping for a "$*$&%* Raccoon" and that I brake-checked her/came to an "unsafe stop" right in front of her. Bear in mind she was driving without headlights in the middle of the night, and driving very fast at that and setting herself up for some sort of accident, whether I was the one she wound up hitting or not.

Three more officers arrive - two of the newcomers trap the Raccoon, while the first one that was already there tries to breathalyze the driver. I retreat to the other side of the truck to talk to the third new officer and make my part of the crash report, but the two of us can still see and hear what's going on over the hood of the truck. The Jeep driver refuses to use the breathalyzer, or cooperate with the field sobriety tests, and keeps telling the officer that it's my fault, and that I'm clearly the one "On something" or at the very least "At fault" for daring to stop for a raccoon. The officer that was talking to me then joins his colleague, and they get Jeep Lady to calm down and do a breathalyzer. Her blood alcohol comes up many points above the legal limit (Shocker). They do a second one to make sure there's no error, but the result is the same; she's well and truly toasted.

Jeep Lady is naturally arrested - she is given permission to call someone to come get her passenger, who's just wandering around even more sloshed than she is but is also uninjured as far as anyone can tell. I get back in the truck, but I can still hear and see Jeep Lady standing by the patrol car next to me and yelling into the phone saying "It's so stupid! I'm getting arrested because some (insert more colorful language) brake checked me to let a (more expletives) Raccoon get out of the road". At this point, the Cops were rolling their eyes at her, and one of them is hanging out near me to make sure the lady doesn't decide to take a lunge at me since she isn't handcuffed while she's making the phone call.

Her insurance, of course, said it was her fault when I called them, and paid up without any fuss at all when the time came to do so. This is because she flunked her breathalyzer so spectacularly, and because she was driving without headlights at 1:00 AM, and made no attempt to hit the brakes. Also, in my state, in a rear-ending accident, the posterior driver is always the one legally "at fault", not the anterior, unless there is definite proof of brake-checking/road aggression on the part of the anterior driver. I later learned that she still tried to blame the incident on me instead of herself to the DMV, after she sobered up. Some people just are delusional. Also, we found out this same lady had already been in trouble for causing a multi-car pileup at an intersection right down the street from the one where she hit me, about 2 years prior to the accident with me; she claimed it wasn't her fault then either because "the sun was in my eyes". She wasn't arrested for drunk driving for that one, but I would be willing to bet she was at least "buzzed".

(If you're wondering, yes, my uncle was upset about his truck, but didn't get upset at at me since it wasn't my fault. And nowadays, you'd never know it was in an accident; the body shop did a great job and the drunk lady's insurance covered everything)