[Content warning: This article quotes graphic, hateful language and describes a violent attack.]

Art Mortimer knew instinctively that if he didn’t take a chance and try to grab the four-foot iron bar wielded like a baseball bat by the enraged trucker, he would be seriously injured or killed.

Mortimer, a commercial transport inspector at a weigh station near Sparwood, B.C., had issued two tickets to the trucker and told him about a provincial rule that required him to shift the load.

The trucker circled his Mack semi-trailer truck around the station once, and then rammed Mortimer’s 1981 Datsun car into the side of the weighmaster building.

Armed with the bar, the trucker clambered onto the car’s roof and started smashing out the remaining glass in the building’s windows while yelling that he was coming for Mortimer.

Standing behind the counter as this surreal attack unfolded, Mortimer irrationally thought, “I can’t fight him in here, we just got new computers.” So he bolted out the front door.

“He caught me real quick,” Mortimer recalls. “He is a pretty big, tall fellow. He came at me with a batter’s stance like he was going to swing at my head and I thought, ‘Well, my only option is to close in on him and grab the bar,’ which I did.

“We wrestled over the bar for a while and he gave me a couple of hockey checks with it, tried to knee me in the groin, but he was quite a bit taller than me so I took it all belt high.”