Riley Leon's car caught in the high winds during Monday's tornado in Texas.
The driver of a truck seen in widely-circulated video flipping over on a highway in Texas during a tornado is getting a new truck, thanks to a local car dealership. The video of Riley Leon showed his car being tossed around by the strong tornado winds on Monday, before it miraculously bounced back on its wheels. Leon then drives off. The tornado was among the several to have hit the region due to a strong storm system, which uprooted trees, damaged homes and shut down highways.
Speaking to local news channels, Leon said he still can't believe he survived that. “Seeing the videos, I'm like ‘that's me and I could've probably not been here'. But thank god I am,” the 16-year-old told Fox 7.
Leon said he was going back home from a job interview at Whataburger. The teenager also said that the insurance company took away the car smashed by the tornado.
But NBC later carried a story in which Bruce Lowrie Chevrolet, a car dealership in Fort Worth, announced that it is giving the teenager a 2022 Red Chevy Silverado to replace the damaged car.
Leon told the channel he didn't know what to do when the car was stuck in the tornado - “to grab onto the steering wheel or to start praying".
"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," he added.
The video spread like wildfire on the internet, with thousands of views within a few hours.
“Was this truck spinning on its side, then flipped upright before it just drove away after getting caught up in a tornado?” a Twitter user said in his post.
“Omg... just going thru my video. This is a story about a red truck and a tornado…. I CANNOT believe they drove away like that,” another user said.
The NBC report further said that Leon also got the job and will be joining Whataburger on Monday.