Motorist Live-Streaming To 'Make Drive Less Boring' Finds Himself In Near-Fatal Situation

ANTELOPE VALLEY (CBSLA) — "I'm streaming just to, like, make the drive less boring."

That's what actor David Slavitt said during his drive-time live-stream Thursday before his situation went from "less boring" to almost fatal.

The 30-year-old, who posted under the YouTube handle "lameduckg," was driving while he was streaming on Facebook Live from the Antelope Valley yesterday afternoon.

"What is this guy doing? Look how slow he's going," Slavitt said behind a truck— one hand on his phone, the other on the steering wheel. Some time later, he gave out a terrified scream and the video video went dark.

The distracted driver from Claremont was apparently slammed on the driver's side by a big-rig tractor trailer at a three-way intersection.

Slavitt was airlifted to Antelope Valley Hospital with moderate to major injuries and is expected to survive.

Slavitt had just turned the phone camera on himself, so the truck cannot be seen hitting Slavitt's vehicle. However, if you freeze the video at the right spot, you can see the red big rig reflected in his sunglasses.

This incident is another example of how the pursuit of social media fame can put people's — the users' and innocent bystanders' — lives in danger.

"It's a really hard reminder that we need to look at ourselves and see what we need to change as drivers," Officer Siara Luna with the California Highway Patrol told CBS2 News. "We need to kind of take a step back and really make sure that we are in complete control when we're driving because you don't wanna have to look back and say, 'I wish I would have just put my phone away.'"

Last year, the social media platform Snapchat was blamed for one its filters that gauged a person's speed in real-time, after a woman tried to film herself driving at high speeds before crashing her vehicle. The urge to post on social media was so powerful, the woman posted a photo of herself in a stretcher after the accident with a caption reading, "Lucky to be alive."

This was the latest live video for Slavitt, who had previously filmed himself getting mugged in Hollywood.