Don't depend on the kindness of strangers

When 25-year-old Cassandra McWade got in a car accident on a highway in Asheville, North Carolina, on Monday, Ken Shupe drove his tow truck to the scene. But when he saw that McWade, who has disabilities, had Bernie Sanders signs on her Toyota Camry, he decided he wouldn’t help.

“He said, ‘I can’t tow you ... you’re a Bernie supporter,’” McWade recalled. “I was like, ‘Wait, are you serious? You’re kidding me.’”

Ken Shupe, a 51-year-old from Travelers Rest, South Carolina, was very serious. “I’m a conservative Christian, I’ve just drawn a line in the sand,” he said. “I’m not going to associate or conduct business with them.” (The incident was first reported by FOX Carolina 21.)

McWade was heading home to Travelers Rest on I-26 when a tractor trailer hit the front of her car, she said. Afterward, her car wouldn’t start, and a first responder moved it to the side of the interstate. The driver’s door was approximately two feet from the highway line, she recalled.

McWade said she collects disability payments and has psoriatic arthritis, impaired mobility, early stage Crohn’s disease, severe fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. (She sent HuffPost a picture of the disability tag, as well as a photo of her many medications.)

“I was in a little bit of a shock, and definitely a little scared,” she said.

Shupe showed up, saw the Sanders signs, and drove back to South Carolina without sticking around. McWade was “sitting there in a very safe area ... with her air conditioning on and her car locked, she was perfectly fine,” he said. He didn’t know she had disabilities, he said, but noted, “there’s a huge difference between being disabled and drawing disability.”