Speaking from my previous experience as a car salesman (over a decade ago now) people can say or do really stupid things if they get denied for a car they want because of bad credit. Some will act as if they didn’t know they had bad credit, which used to piss me off because they came in and knowingly wasted my time, while others will say the dealer was the one that did something to make their credit bad. And some people can get so mad they’re willing to damage both the car they were interested in and dealer property, as one man recently showed by crashing into a BMW dealer after being denied a test drive in an M4.
You probably won’t be surprised, but this incident happened in Florida and comes to us by way of Gainesville, Florida’s ABC 20, with Carscoops first alerting us to the story. Local authorities say 20-year-old Kevin Alexander Leiman went into BMW of Gainesville on February 25th; ABC says he was wanting to buy a “$110,000 M4,” but thanks to a post on the Bimmerpost forum, we know the car in question was actually an M4 CS that’s listed at $129,175. Leiman was stopped before he even got to touch the car, as the dealer required a credit check before the test drive, and Leiman didn’t pass it. That set him off, and authorities say that he attempted to grab the keys to the M4 while he was leaving, but dealer employees stopped him.
A totally rational and valid reaction
Once he got to the parking lot, police say Leiman sat in his car for an unknown amount of time before he started circling the dealership — the Bimmerpost user says he thinks Leiman’s car was a Hyundai SUV. Then, like a scene out of some action movie, Leiman drove his car through the windows of the showroom. Still set on trying to get the M4 he was denied, Leiman started looking for the keys again, but when he couldn’t find them, he fled on foot. He was caught by police a short time later.
Now Leiman is facing some serious charges, all because he couldn’t handle being denied a test drive of a car he probably couldn’t afford in the first place. Authorities say he’s facing grand theft auto and criminal mischief charges. He could also be on the hook for the estimated $60,000 in damages he caused to the dealer, though it could be more as authorities say they’re still trying to figure out the true extent of the damages. From an image posted to Bimmerpost the damage doesn’t seem that bad, but there is glass everywhere — hopefully the M4 CS wasn’t hit by any debris.