Maurya Dissanayake
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
Somewhere off Interstate 45 in Houston, Texas, there’s a little ordinary gas station cleverly-known as the Fuel Depot. On the scorching sunny afternoon of July 10th, some random Fuel Depot manager pulled his car into the quiet lot, as he did every afternoon around this time. Groaning with the defeated sigh of a man returning to work to finish his shift, the dude threw the gear shifter into park, turned the ignition, and stepped out onto the molten-hot Texas asphalt.
Suddenly behind him came the screech of tires. A white SUV slammed to a stop, blocking the manager’s vehicle into the parking spot.
In a flash, two men exited the SUV. And they didn’t look like they were selling Girl Scout cookies to raise money for a trip to the cheerleading regional qualifiers.
Rushing forward, the two guys ambushed the manager from behind, knocking him head-first to the ground like a human version of that time they knocked the Saddam Hussein statue down in Baghdad. These guys were big, scary, and they fucking meant business. They knew exactly who they were looking for, when he was going to be there, and what he was carrying.
Namely, a bigass bank bag stuffed with cash.
The manager, for his part, held on tight to the precious sack of bills despite the relentless assault of humanity thundering into him, so these two upstanding model citizens valiantly proceeded to beat the fuck out of him while he was on the ground, hitting him repeatedly in the head and beck in an attempt to violently wrench the money from his hands.
Now look, I get it. Times are tough. People are struggling to make ends meet. Your kids won’t shut up about wanting you to buy some stupid useless bullshit they’ve seen on TV, your landlord is trying to make you work off your debt by smuggling weapons-grade diet pills across the Canadian border, and you have to work three and a half hours at a back-breaking day job just to buy a goddamn replacement pack of blades for your Mach 4 ProGlide Fusion-powered Extendo-Cut Quatro Cinco Limited Edition Beard Annihilator portable handheld personal grooming device. Meanwhile Bank of America is deploying deep cover wetwork squads from C-130s on late-night high-altitude low-opening combat drops to break your mom’s legs because you can’t seem to get on top of your bills and your dinner most nights consists of despondently crunching on a brick of uncooked Top Ramen. It sucks. We’ve been there.
But here’s the important thing to remember: None of this will ever make it OK for you and your friends to beat the shit out of a stranger and rob him.
Luckily, Karma is a motherfucker, and she will kick you really goddamn hard in the fucking face when you least expect it.
And that’s exactly what happened to these assholes.
There’s nothing quite like a shitty, minimum-wage customer service job to make you want to punch every fucking human being on the planet in the face as hard as you can until everyone is unconscious and you can finally just stick your mouth on the goddamn Slurpee machine and chug Coke slushie until you asphyxiate. No matter how many managers tell you that “company policy is that employees do not ruthlessly pummel anyone unconscious while they are on the clock”, I’d wager that every bag boy, fry cook, barista, cashier, and customer service specialist from Malibu to Omaha spends the majority of their shift secretly praying that they can catch a shoplifter making a break for it just so they’d have one opportunity to tackle a customer in the parking lot and kick them in the head. That’s the true American Dream, and it’s the only thing that got me through half my shifts at the grocery store, the movie theater, or Radio Shack.
The difference here, however, is that the guy working the minimum wage job behind the counter of the Fuel Depot in Houston, Texas wasn’t just some random guy. It was Maurya Dissanayake, a five-time Sri Lankan national MMA champion with ten years of fighting experience under his belt and a right hook that could decapitate a whale.
And Maurya wasn’t all that pumped up about watching two assholes beat the shit out of his co-worker.
So he sacked up like a fucking man and did something about it.
BEST GRAPHIC EVER
As is the case with this a lot of current events stuff, there’s a lot of wildly-conflicting information regarding who the hell Maurya Dissanayake actually is. A couple reports list him as a five-time national champ in Sri Lanka. Others say he won five fights, which is a little different, but whatever. What we know for sure is that this fucking guy is a hard-working dude who came over to the states because he wanted to make a better life for himself by joining the Ultimate Fighting Championship and knocking grown men senseless with an endless barrage of roundhouse kicks to the skull. And when this dude isn’t working a full-time gig selling smokes at the Fuel Depot he’s at the gym kicking the shit out of punching bags and sparring partners using some style of martial art I’ve never heard of before but that certainly seems effective.
Flying out of the gas station mini-mart like a shampoo commercial Batman, the excellently-coiffed Sri Lankan kickboxer charged through the doors, closed the distance in a heartbeat, and falcon kicked the first mugger so fucking hard in the face that the dude keeled over and smacked into the side of the car on his way to the blacktop. The second dude, who was so preoccupied with being a robbing douchebag that he didn’t notice the gigantically-tall dude with perfect hair come running up like a one-way express train to Facekickopolis, and that poor bastard looked up just in time to catch a five-knuckle Instagram to the chops and go sprawling out on his back.
After clubbing down two thugs with two swings and pulling his boss’s balls out of the fire, Dissanayake continued to lay down an epic beating the likes of which would make any customer service representative blush. A third perpetrator, the guy who had been driving the SUV and had the good fucking sense not to leave the relative safety of his vehicle, started to pull the getaway car out of the lot, ready to get the fuck out of there at a moment’s notice. The groggy muggers struggled to their feet and desperately tried to flee the flying fists of Sri Lankan fury, and Maurya was more than happy to oblige them. Maurya backed off to let them make their escape, but when both muggers suddenly grew a pair of nuts, took a step towards him, and started talking shit the fucking semi-pro UFC hopeful who had just beat the hell out of them Maurya wasn’t having it. He threw a friggin’ shoe at them, charged, and nailed one of the dudes completely fucking senseless with a punch that could have sunk a warship. The two other guys bailed, leaving their buddy to face Maurya’s wrath. Maurya, unsure of whether the dude had a weapon on him and unwilling to take the chance, knocked the guy out with a couple kicks to the head and called the cops. It was probably a good call – the cops have already been using that dude’s mug shot in lineups because he’s also a suspect in a troubling string of unrelated crimes.
According to Dissanayake, “I think I did really good. I did everything as I planned. I didn’t even miss anything, whatever I hit, I landed on them. One thing I regret, the first time I kicked the guy I couldn’t knock him out. If I had knocked him out, I would have got two guys. I could have [had] both criminals instead of one guy.”
His best quote, however, reads like a line from The Raid.
"I know there's a possibility that they could come back and try to get revenge or something, but I'm ready. I wouldn't say I'm scared, but I'm careful, and I'm prepared. If they come, they come.”
Dissanayake in Sri Lanka.
So, without further ado, while most of the world was out watching shitty, super-dark, ultra-grainy shaky-cam footage of former teen heartthrobs not almost-punching each other, they missed out on one of the most awesome security-camera-recorded asskickings ever. Enjoy.