Wild ‘Ice Pick Bandit’ Rumors Hit Scene of Helene Devastation

Worse than the fear that no immediate help was coming was a rumor that relief trucks were being sabotaged to keep them from reaching stricken Asheville, North Carolina, in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

“People started crying because it felt like almost a terrorist attack,” 20-year-old Jordan Lanning told The Daily Beast on Monday night. “I guess that’s the word because it was just like people were terrified.”

After Lanning’s hometown had been destroyed, along with his residence and the Walmart where he worked stacking shelves, he posted a video of the ruined store on a TikTok page that he otherwise devotes to Nascar.

“So my friends could see,” he recalled.

Lanning was deluged with online questions and comments from strangers.

“It blew up,” he said. “Everyone was like, ‘What’s happening? We don’t know what’s going on.’”

The mainstream media that is usually in place when such weather events bear down has proven to be more geared to coastal landfalls than inland floods, given that mountains usually break up the worst of a weather system as it moves inland. The result was an information vacuum, and Lanning saw a way he could do his bit after the firefighters he had been helping to clear fallen trees deemed it too dangerous because there were so many downed power lines.

“I want to help people,” he told The Daily Beast. “I’m trying to become a police officer. I’m not old enough yet, because I’m not 21. But I have a TikTok page.”

He began posting whatever news he heard from the disaster’s ground zero, where the news crews should have been.

“I update every morning, and I update every night,” he said.

In one post, he passed on a terrorizing rumor that “came down the grape vine” and “everybody was saying” had people in tears:

“So over on I 40 [Interstate 40] there were some truckers coming in with supplies and medical stuff trying to help us. They stopped at a truck stop to get some rest. When they woke up, their tires were slashed.”

Someone reposted his TikTok on X, and there was online theorizing that it was the work of Black Lives Matter or maybe progressive billionaire George Soros. A poster opined that whoever did it, “Vandalizing a relief shipment should be a capital offense, with contemporaneous instant application.”

Somebody else wrote, “That’s unbelievable. How can you do such things? I am boiling while I read this! May God help those in need and those who come to help!”

MAGA madness flared as another person flatly stated, “I’m sure it was feds who slashed the tires.”

That prompted someone to post: “Or Freemasons who are controlled by feds. Same agenda.”

The source of the rumor appears to have been an actual incident in which a total of 56 tires had been punctured—if not exactly slashed—on eight tractor trailers between the night of Sept. 25 and 8 a.m. the following day on Interstate 40 in Madison County, Tennessee.

But that was more than 15 hours before Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida. The trucks were from various companies, and police were given no indication that they were carrying relief supplies. The tires all had identical small punctures as would result from an ice pick.

“I would have no reason to believe that’s what it was at that particular time,” Jeff Walls, director of operations for the Madison County Sheriff’s office, told The Daily Beast on Monday.

Walls reported that his office checked the internet and learned that adjacent Henderson County had reported a similar incident on Sept. 11, when tires were punctured on seven trucks. The perpetrator was videoed in the act by two dashcams and appeared to be the same man who was caught on video similarly puncturing tires on Interstate 75 Florida in June 2023.

As reported by Overdrive, truckers dubbed the man “the Ice Pick Bandit.” He is believed to have punctured tires in Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, and Tennessee. The same truck stop in Clark County, Arkansas, was hit on Sept. 17, with Sheriff Jason Watson suggesting it was “just pure spite.”

Captain Tracey Grisham at the Henderson County Sheriff's office said in one incident that a truck had a load of tires and the Ice Pick Bandit punctured every one of them. Grisham said he had never encountered such a case.

“And I’ve been doing this for 28 years,” he said.

Lanning said he gave the rumor about sabotaged relief trucks added credence because somebody had slashed the tires on his roommate’s pickup truck on Friday night.

“And they cut his gas line, but didn’t steal his gas,” Lanning added. “They cut his battery too. They just sabotaged it intentionally.”

But given the pre-disaster timing of the attack on numerous tractor-trailers on Interstate 40 and the many similar incidents over more than a year, the rumor seems to have been only that.

The Ice Pick Bandit remains at large. And, perhaps a little more careful about what he hears via the grapevine, Lanning will keep updating from what he describes as “a war zone.”

“People are begging me to go find families, and I can’t right now,” he said. “When the roads are fixed, I will try.”