New York – A man who zoomed a sports car around Manhattan in 24 minutes was found guilty on Thursday of reckless endangerment and reckless driving, prosecutors said.
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Adam Tang, 31, who has a Canadian passport, faces up to a year imprisonment for the daredevil act he videotaped and uploaded to the Internet last year and which quickly became an online hit, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said in a statement.
“The city’s roadways are not a racetrack,” Vance said. “Adam Tang showed blatant disregard for our traffic laws, and this dangerous and illegal behavior – which he repeatedly flaunted online – placed lives at risk.”
Tang, who also goes by the name Afroduck, was not present for the jury verdict read at state Supreme Court in Manhattan, a DA spokeswoman said. She declined to comment on news reports that Tang had fled the country.
An attorney for Tang could not immediately be reached for comment.
The District Attorney’s Office declined to say how fast Tang was going but said that information would be released later in the day.
The video at the center of Tang’s trial, which appears to have been filmed from the dashboard of a 2006 BMW Z4, was posted on YouTube in August of last year and has attracted over 800,000 viewers.
To the soundtrack of electronic dance music, the video shows a car weaving in and out of traffic at an accelerated rate, zipping through tunnels and under bridges.
At times, lights from city skyscrapers can be seen glittering in the background as the vehicle shoots down the Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive and up the Henry Hudson Highway, stopping at several red lights.
The six-minute video, which was shown in sped-up motion and appears to be shot at night, ends when the car reaches the same spot where it started from.
An image of a duck with a tuft of fluffy feathers on its head with the words “2013 Afro Duck Productions” scrawled across it is shown in the last few seconds of the video.
Tang was arrested shortly after the clip was published and has remained free on bail.
His sentencing date was set for Dec. 8, prosecutors said.
There are so many reasons to throw out this conviction. He was not caught or witnessed by police- just from his own alleged recording. The recording was sped up- so they cannot prove how fast he was going anyway. Self incrimination – what about his Amendment rights?