Appleton Police Want the Driver Who Towed a Car, With Two People Aboard, Over a Taco Bell Drive-Thru Bollard

In the security video Appleton police released Monday, the Taco Bell order doesn’t come from the pickup’s cab. It comes from the flatbed trailer behind it, where a woman sits in a white four-door with her window down and a man stands on the deck. A few seconds later the trailer’s rear tire climbs a yellow bollard, the truck accelerates, and the bollard goes over.

The Appleton Police Department posted the footage to its Facebook page Monday morning, Oct. 19, and asked the public to help identify the truck under case number A26052865. AppletonToday reported that it happened Saturday at the Taco Bell in the 2800 block of West College Avenue. FOX 11 put the time at 5:15 p.m.

What the camera caught

The tow vehicle is a large white work truck. Behind it is a flatbed trailer carrying a white four-door car. AppletonToday described the man on the trailer appearing to talk into the drive-thru speaker while the woman in the car talked with her window down. WHBY reported that a person riding in the car placed the order. The two accounts differ on which of them did the ordering, but both put the customer on the trailer.

Drive-thru lanes are drawn for a single car, and a truck-and-trailer combination doesn’t follow a single path through one. On a turn, a trailer’s wheels track inside the line the tow vehicle took, and the farther the trailer axle sits from the hitch, the tighter it cuts. The driver here cleared the lane with the truck. The trailer’s rear driver-side tire found the bollard.

According to AppletonToday’s description of the video, the driver accelerated instead of stopping when the tire met the post, toppled it and left without dealing with the damage.

What police haven’t released

The public reports give no license plate, no make or model for the truck or the car, no damage estimate and no mention of injuries. Nobody has been publicly identified. The dates don’t fully line up, either: a FOX6 Milwaukee write-up of the same video dated it Sept. 17, which was a Thursday, while AppletonToday’s account says Saturday.

What Wisconsin law required

Wisconsin Statute 346.69 says a driver whose crash damages only fixtures or other property “legally upon or adjacent to a highway” must take reasonable steps to find and notify the owner, and hand over a name, an address and the vehicle’s registration number. The maximum forfeiture is $200. If police can’t pin down the driver, 346.675 lets them cite the vehicle’s owner instead, for up to $100, unless the owner names whoever was behind the wheel.

A second duty kicks in if the damage to one owner’s property reaches an apparent $1,000. Section 346.70 then requires an immediate report to police, and it puts that duty on the “operator or occupant” of the vehicle. Occupants 16 and older face the same $200 to $500 forfeiture as the driver. Police haven’t said what the bollard costs to replace, so whether that threshold was crossed is one of the things the case file would answer.

Riding on the trailer

Wisconsin’s illegal-riding statute bars anyone from riding on a part of a vehicle not designed or intended for passengers, and bars driving while someone is. A first offense carries a $20 to $40 forfeiture. The state does have a specific rule against people riding inside towed mobile homes, RVs and boats on a highway, in 346.94(8). A car on a flatbed isn’t on that list.

The footage covers only the drive-thru lane, a private lot. It doesn’t show how the truck, the car and the two people on the trailer got to College Avenue, or whether anyone stayed aboard on the road.

Appleton police are asking anyone who knows the truck or its driver to call 920-832-5500 or email APDTips@appletonwi.gov and reference case A26052865.

If the driver turns up, should the people who placed the order from the trailer share the citation, or does the bollard belong to whoever had the wheel?

Sources: Appleton Police Department security video and Facebook post (case A26052865); Wisconsin Statutes 346.69, 346.675, 346.70, 346.74, 346.92, 346.94 and 346.95; local reporting by AppletonToday, FOX 11 (WLUK), WHBY and FOX6 Milwaukee.

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Shawn Henry

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Shawn Henry has spent years writing about cars, and it shows—not in a resume kind of way, but in how he talks about them. He's the type who'll notice the weird trim option nobody remembers and actually know why it mattered. At Backfire News, he covers pretty much the whole spectrum: off-road trucks and trail builds, performance cars, racing, and the collector market. He's comfortable getting into the technical weeds, but he never forgets that most people read about cars because cars are fun, not because they want a spec sheet. His beat runs from classic and collector vehicles to overlanding culture, modified performance builds, new automotive tech, and the industry news that actually affects what ends up in your driveway. Mostly, though, Shawn thinks the best car stories are about people—the builds they pour money into, the road trips, the communities that form around a shared obsession. That's the stuff he likes writing about, and it's what you'll find in his work here.

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