ROCKDALE COUNTY, Ga. — A local recording artist says he thought he was about to lose his life when his new high-end SUV caught fire with him inside.
Gabe Lustman watched as the fire left his 2020 Range Rover Velar in ashes.
He told Channel 2’s Tom Jones for Channel 2 Action News at 6:00 he had no warning.
“No gauges went off. I didn’t have any forewarning,” he said.
Then he admitted some drivers tried to warn him as he drove on Interstate 20 in McDuffie County as he headed to Augusta June 3.
He ignored them initially. Then one driver was really emphatic. “‘Hey! Your car’s on fire.’ And then I was like, ‘My car’s on fire? Oh my,’” Lustman said.
He says flames started shooting from underneath the car, on the side and in the back.
“It looked like some kind of Bruce Willis ‘Die Hard’ movie or something. It was, like, so crazy,” he said.
Lustman says while he was in the car, the flames and smoke started coming inside.
That’s when he says he used his T-shirt to open the hot door and jumped through the fire to safety.
“I just went like this, and then I went like this, and I just jumped through the fire,” Lustman said.
He says he got as far away as he could from the SUV: “And then all of a sudden the car blows up. It was like pooosh. It was like ‘kaboom’ you know.”
Lustman suffered minor burns. Paramedics took him to the hospital.
He says he has seen cars engulfed in flames on the road before. “But you don’t realize how scary it is until it happens to you,” Lustman said.
Jones covered the singer-songwriter back in 2023 when doctors had to save his leg after he was bitten by a brown recluse spider.
Now there’s this. “I felt like Superman jumping through fire. And Spider-Man before that,” he said.
Lustman is working with his insurance company to find out how this happened.
He says he lost money and equipment in the fire. But he is grateful he still has his life.
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