LAPD names person of interest in flying Tesla stunt as victim sees huge donations roll in
LAPD wants to talk to an influencer called Dominykas Zeglaitis.
The Los Angeles Police Department has named a person of interest in the flying Tesla stunt following numerous tips from the public.
Police had appealed for information on the incident, which went viral earlier this week. In the video, a rented Tesla Model S jumped across an intersection on a residential street, crashing into various wheelie bins before hitting a parked Subaru Forester.
The LAPD took to Twitter to report that more than 50 people had sent tips about the identity of the driver, with authorities offering $1,000 to anyone providing information that lead to an identification.
It said: “Over 90 per cent of the tips are of the same person who has a TikTok handle of @dominykas or @durtedom on Twitter.”
These accounts belong to a man called Dominykas Zeglaitis, who uploaded videos from the scene of the crash as well as a video laughing at a news story about the event, adding the tagline: ‘LAPD didn’t like my stunt’.
However, none of the footage directly shows Zeglaitis behind the wheel of the vehicle.
The viral video was shot by YouTuber Alex Choi, who claimed not to know the driver, saying he was just ‘some random dude’ who offered to show him the location where another internet personality, David Dobrik, had performed a similar stunt.
Choi claimed he had no idea the person would go on to perform their own jump, and later revealed that a stray cat that had been carried in the car at the time was not injured.
In just three days, Hook has surpassed his $20,000 (£15,155) target by almost $3,000 (£2,273). A video uploaded yesterday (March 23) explains that Hook started the fund when it was unclear whether he would receive any financial support from his insurance, setting the $20k target based on the cost of replacing his car with a like-for-like model.
He has since had conversations with his insurer who say they will pay some or all of the repairs, and will agree to a settlement if the vehicle is written off.
Because of this, Hook added: “I’ll cash out the GoFundMe, take what I need to bridge that gap [between the settlement and the price of a replacement car], and give the rest to the California Wildlife Centre.
“They are an awesome organisation that I used to volunteer for. They take injured animals and rehabilitate them and then release them back into the wild. They’re great, they’re local and they’re good people too.”