The young man who fended off a woman terrorizing workers at a SoCal In-N-Out using only a spatula has been identified as an acrobatic daredevil.
Luca Opperman, 20, was widely praised for repelling a stick-swinging woman inside a Lake Elsinore In-N-Out who was apparently upset because staff didn’t “make her burger fast enough.”
Opperman is a former gymnast and freestyle trampoline athlete. His Instagram page is full of videos of his spectacular chops as an acrobat.
In one recent clip, Opperman is seen sliding down a slide face-first before going off the edge of it. The 20-year-old then contorts his body to flip in the air before coming out of it to land in the water cleanly.
He apparently showed some of those agile skills when he arrived at the scene to confront the burger joint terrorizer.
“He gets out of his car and he jumps through the window like he’s Spiderman or does this Jackie Chan move feet first through the window,” a witness said.
Opperman told KTLA he jumped into action because he heard yelling from inside the restaurant.
“I just hear banging, super loud banging coming from the inside of the lobby,” he told KTLA. “I look up and I see this lady smashing what looked like a baseball bat.”
The college student armed himself with a spatula against the woman, who had a large, sharpened wooden stick.
“I’m holding the spatula, wielding my spatula and yelling at her, ‘Get out of here! Get out of here!’” he said of the fight.
But the woman did not leave and began swinging the stick at him. Opperman decided that he would try to disarm the woman as employees sat in a back room of the In-N-Out.
“That’s when you see me go in with the shoulder drop,” he said. “I checked her. I grabbed the stick. This was a stick the size of a baseball bat, and the other end was snapped off, so it had a thick sharp end and edges.”
He managed to grab the woman’s sharpened stick and end the ordeal. Police would later arrest the woman.
“If I didn’t step in right there and then, I knew that somebody would have gotten hurt,” he said.
There were no injuries in the incident, and Opperman is being hailed as a hero.
“The In N Out slayer himself,” one person commented on his Instagram post.
“You are a hero, sir! Well done and thank you,” another wrote.
A witness previously called on the establishment to reward the man with “burgers for life.”
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