Road rage driver loses to martial arts instructor

A man overcome with road rage got the shock of his life on Friday when the man he attacked turned out to be a martial arts instructor. The results were posted to the video Web site YouTube and called “Trinidad Fight. White Boy Beats Strong Man.” The video has since gone viral. The “white boy” in the video is martial arts instructor Paul-Daniel Nahous, who has black belts in three forms of martial arts, karate, jujitsu and aikido. In an interview yesterday, Nahous said he was driving along Saddle Road, Maraval, on Friday when he felt a vehicle hit the wheel of his Mitsubishi Sportero pick-up truck. He slowed down and pulled to the side, then heard the sound of a door slamming and turned just in time to see a man’s fist coming toward his face. Nahous’ shock lasted long enough for the man to get in a few punches and grab the baton he uses in his karate classes. 

Nahous got out of his truck and the two struggled but Nahous soon got the upper hand and pinned the other man to the ground. “I never hit him once. I spent the whole time trying to restrain him, while people were shouting: ‘White boy, hit him, bust his throat.’ I just restrained him.” In a post on his blog at triniworldviews.com on Saturday, he noted: “Aikido’s classic intention is to subdue an opponent without actually hurting him.” “The incident,” he wrote, “made me thank God again for my seven years of training in traditional martial arts and multiple black belts.” Nahous said yesterday that while he restrained his attacker on the ground, he saw “tears of rage” in the other man’s eyes. “I repeatedly told him to calm down and he just would not listen. When I asked people who were looking at us for help restraining him, no one responded.” “Onlookers,” he wrote on his blog, “were egging me on to hit him and others taunting him to his embarrassment.”

Nahous praised the police’s handling of the incident, saying when the police arrived, they handcuffed the other man, then searched him and his car. He and his attacker went to the St Clair Police Station, where he made a report of the incident which was uncontested. Though there were multiple witnesses to the incident, Nahous has not pressed charges against his assailant and is considering not doing so. “When I was leaving the police station he came up to me and he pleaded with me not to press charges. He said he had a matter in the court and it would not be good for him,” he added. Nahous said he had received a medical report from his doctor, detailing his injuries, and his doctor had urged him to press charges. Despite this, Nahous, who is the youth chairman of a charitable organisation, the Jericho Project, said he was willing to offer an alternative. “If he would consider coming in to speak to the youths I interact with about violence, I would be willing to give him a chance,” Nahous said.  He said although the incident, which happened on Friday, was negative, he was happy it had got the attention it had. He wrote on his blog on Saturday that already over 100 people had contacted him about the incident.