First stop: a rehab center, where he flatly refused help. Next stop: a McDonald’s parking lot, where officers say he went off the rails trying to hot-wire the wrong car.
Deputies say Michael Anderson was spotted earlier in the evening at OVP Rehab, turning down treatment and insisting he was heading back to Kentucky. But instead of catching a ride, witnesses watched him stagger into McDonald’s lot in South Point and set his sights on a white SUV that wasn’t his.
According to witnesses, Anderson yanked open the vehicle, dumped out bags and glove box contents across the seats, and started wrestling with jumper cables like he was about to spark up a Frankenstein experiment. When a bystander told him the car didn’t belong to him, he allegedly slammed the hood down with a bang, stomped to the back, and whacked the hatch so hard it echoed across the lot.
The terrified owner — a McDonald’s employee working her shift — was told by coworkers her car was under siege. She rushed outside only to see her belongings scattered and Anderson insisting it was “his wife’s car.”
Bystanders kept an eye on him until deputies arrived and hauled him off. Anderson, still rambling that he “didn’t want help or rehab, just a ride home,” was charged with inducing panic and taken to the Lawrence County Jail. As a condition of bail, the judge ordered him back to rehab — the very thing he’d run from hours before.
Court is set for October 24.
