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Las Vegas, NV – The UFC fighter known as “The American Psycho” was pulled over and detained by a convoy of Jeeps and tractor trailers on Sunday afternoon (video below).
“We were coming on the I-15 southbound into Las Vegas and he came across the dirt, coming into the south. He didn’t stop or wait or anything, he came straight out into the traffic and he was very lucky,” witness Katie Dyer said, according to the New York Post.
Dyer was traveling with her 10-year-old son, Chance in a convoy of other Jeeps who belong to a club called JeepFam when they encountered the obviously-impaired driver.
They later learned the driver was UFC fighting legend Stephan Bonnar.
Trooper Jason Buratczuk of the Nevada Highway Patrol said witnesses had reported Bonnar’s vehicle going more than 90 miles per hour and making unsafe lane changes, the New York Post reported.
“We have radios so we said, ‘Who is calling the police?’ One of our people caught up to him and he seemed to be laying down. He wasn’t sitting up in the driver’s seat. He was going from shoulder to shoulder, from the emergency lane all the way across. Two truckers had slowed down to stop him,” she said.
“We carried on and boxed our Jeeps around him,” Dyer explained. “There were six of us. We slowly stopped with the box around him.”
Meanwhile, passing truckers arranged their vehicles across the road in a line that eventually brought the Jeep convoy to a stop at about 2 p.m. on Oct. 28, the New York Post reported.
Dyer said that once the convoy stopped, she and some other drivers tried to pull him out of his car and take the key.
“By the time we got over there, his eyes weren’t open, and he wasn’t moving,” she said. But then he woke up and tried to get away.
“We were all panicking. He had the car in drive and was hitting the car behind and mine in front. He was ramming into my Jeep,” Dyer described the scary scene, much of which her son captured on cell phone video.
They had to tie Bonnar’s arms to his car doors to keep him from taking off.
“We have ratchet straps that we would use for luggage, so we tied his right arm to his right door frame and his left arm to his left door frame,” Dyer said.
She said police arrived around 20 minutes later.
“When the trooper arrived on scene he observed the driver of the Cadillac had been physically restrained by citizens and appeared to be incoherent,” Trooper Buratczuk said.
The Nevada Highway Patrol released bodycam video of Bonnar’s arrest on Wednesday.
The video showed a trooper putting handcuffs on Bonnar’s left arm while other motorists untied his other arm from the passenger’s side of the car.
Bonnar looked unconscious and his head flopped to the side in the video as the trooper fought to get him out of the car.
At first the fighter was just dead weight, but as he slowly woke up, he began to struggle.
Once the trooper got him out of the car and onto the ground, he began actively resisting arrest.
The video showed that several of the motorists who had helped to stop Bonnar’s car initially jumped in to help the trooper apply handcuffs to the inebriated man.
“You picked the wrong group of guys dude,” one of the men told Bonnar in the bodycam video as the handcuffs were tightened on the fighter’s wrist.
Dyer said she thought it had been a close call.
“We definitely thought people were dying when we saw him,” she said. “A lot of families were traveling back because it was the weekend, and his driving was erratic.”
Once Bonnar had been subdued and restrained, medics checked him out and cleared him, and he was taken to jail, the Nevada Highway Patrol said.
Bonnar was charged on suspicion of driving under the influence, unsafe starting or moving of a stopped vehicle, and resisting a public officer, the New York Post reported.
Bail was set at $22,000 and Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department records indicated that he remained in custody.
Watch the Jeep convoy and police bodycam in the videos belowbelow (NOTE: More than one video. Scroll for more.)