A shoeless man napping on a roadside bench in China jolted awake when a truck-struck billboard crashed down within inches of his skull.
The near-fatal encounter played out September 7 in Chaozhou, a city in eastern Guangdong province, according to video. The man had been stretched out unconscious on the bench when a truck barreled into a nearby sign and sent it hurtling toward him. The corner of the billboard slammed into a pack of cigarettes resting beside him, sparing his head by a razor-thin margin.
The footage shows the sleeper stirring as debris rains down, apparently startled but unharmed despite the violent impact. He lost his shoes somewhere in the chaos, though how or when remained unclear from the clip alone.
Online viewers seized on the cigarette pack’s role in the close call. “That’s like when Teddy Roosevelt almost got assassinated but a thick piece of paper in his coat pocket blocked the bullet,” one commenter observed on the video’s platform.
The comparison to the 1912 shooting of the former president, where a folded speech and eyeglass case slowed a bullet, underscored how seemingly trivial objects can tip the scales between life and death.
Other commentators framed the incident as divine intervention aimed at the man’s smoking habit. “Smoking’s bad for you. A sign from God. It will kill you,” one wrote.
Another agreed, writing, “I would take that as a sign to stop smoking!”
The “Final Destination” horror franchise also dominated reactions, with multiple viewers noting the scene’s uncanny resemblance to the films’ elaborate death-escaping sequences. In that series, characters routinely survive impossibly narrow misses only to face renewed supernatural threats.
Chinese social media platforms lit up with the footage in the days following the incident, though local authorities did not immediately release any statement about the truck driver or potential traffic violations. The condition of the driver and whether anyone else sustained injuries went unreported in the initial coverage.
The billboard itself appeared to be a standard roadside commercial sign, the kind common along busy thoroughfares throughout Chinese cities. Chaozhou, with a population exceeding 2.5 million, sits along the Han River and serves as a manufacturing and transportation hub in the Pearl River Delta region.
For the unnamed sleeper, the episode ended with nothing more than lost footwear and a story that has since circled the globe. No medical personnel appeared to approach him in the footage, and he made no visible attempt to seek help in the immediate aftermath.
The incident joins a growing catalog of near-miss videos from China’s extensive network of traffic and surveillance cameras, which frequently capture dramatic collisions and narrow escapes that spread rapidly online both domestically and abroad.