Broken Bottle to the Dome…

Weed Pillows

We got these two monsters from a traffic stop. There really is no cool story to it… they were just sitting on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Not the smartest driver i’ve encountered. TOTAL WEIGHT: 1.78 LBS

Pass the dutcie on the left hand side… but make sure you lift with your legs.

Runner

It was a slow, warm Monday night. I was riding shotgun, while my partner drove and we listened to “All My Life” by the Foo Fighters through his iPhone. The radio had been quite most of the night… until midnight, when we are assigned a call of a BFMV in progress (Burglary from Motor Vehicle – A fancy way of saying some dudes are breaking into another dude’s car).

We get to the street where these knuckleheads are supposed to be and, they’re gone. Damn. We patrol the area looking for a pick-up truck meeting the description. Still nothing. After searching for another 2 minutes or so, we decide to go to the victim’s house to start scratching out the report. Just before we get there, one of our sergeants broadcasts over the radio that he was following possible BFMV suspect’s, in a vehicle matching the description of our guys. We caught up to him (he was only a block away from us) just as he entered a nearby freeway. We pulled up behind the supervisor’s car and the suspect’s truck. I caught a quick glimpse it’s plate and ran it on our car’s computer. The truck came back stolen. At this point my heart started to race and I fought back a silly grin… time to earn my paycheck.

I broadcast over our radio that we were now following a stolen vehicle and that we needed back-up and airship. Just then, the dip-shit behind the wheel must have noticed we were behind him. He tapped the breaks for a moment, then quickly sped up to almost 80 miles an hour. As we approached a major exit, the suspect darted across two lanes and onto the off ramp, coming to a complete stop in a left turn lane. We were now sitting at a red light, waiting for this guy to turn left. The light turns green, and he goes right. This was the point I knew that this guy wasn’t going to stop… and that was completely fine with me! Our back-up had just arrived and was now directly behind us. The airship had an 8 minute ETA from downtown. We couldn’t wait for them to show up. We needed to stop this guy.

The suspects had now made an immediate right onto a street that paralleled the freeway. We turned on our lights and chirped the siren, in an attempt to stop the truck. Just as we thought they didn’t stop… as a matter of fact, they floored it. The trucks tires spun for a second, spewing a small cloud of white smoke… then it took off like a bat out of hell. We tried our best to stay behind the truck, but he was going way to fast. Our speedometer read 80 MPH (On residential street, where the legal limit is 25), but the truck was pulling away from us. The truck hit a big dip in the road and a dozen bottles of Gatorade went flying out the bed. One of the bottles bounced out of the bed and through the rear window of a Ford Explorer parked on the street.

I felt our car stop accelerating. I Looked at my partner. “I’m not getting us killed for these guys.” he said. The pursuit had taken us outside of our division and neither my partner or I were very familiar with the area. We maintained a speed of about 60, as the truck slowly pulled away from us. Suddenly there was a flash of sparks, a plume of dust and the fading tail lights were gone. An instant later, the truck re-appears, mid-air and upside down, then seems disappear into the ground again. As we approach the end of the street, I notice a chain link fence ahead of us, with a hole in it the size of a Toyota Tundra. Coincidence… I think not.

“Where the fuck did they go?” my partner excitedly asks. “Pull forward.. maybe they landed in the wash…” I answered. We drove over the flattened fence and I shined on of our spot lights into a 30ft concrete drainage wash. There was the truck… laying on it’s passenger side surrounded by broken glass and gatorade bottles. All we could see was the undercarage. I looked left, then right, then left again. No suspects. Still no airship. Did they run? Were they hiding? Just then I heard a moan I will never forget. They were still inside.

Several other patrol units had now come screeching up to where we had stopped. I drew my gun and walked down the grey embankment along with another shotgun toting officer. My partner stayed at the top of the wash to guide in the other units. We walked around the front of the truck and we immediately see the source of all the moaning. The passenger was partially ejected from the truck and was now pinned underneath it. Somehow his body ended up in between the door and door frame. We later formed the theory that he may have opened the door in preparation to run. Once the truck drove into the wash, the door opened completely. The passenger was ejected and as the truck came to it’s final resting place, the door was slammed closed again on impact, pinning the knucklehead. I shouted, to no one in particular “We’ve got one pinned under the vehicle!”. Someone must have heard, because moments later I heard a voice over the radio request that the Fire Department respond. The guy pinned under the truck was in bad shape. His right ear was almost completely severed and he had a hole in the back of his head big enough to accommodate a golf ball. He only spoke only a few words “I can’t breathe, why can’t I breathe!?”. I assured him an ambulance would be here soon and to stop moving. He rested his face in a pile of broken glass as he fell in and out of consciousness.

The driver was in the back seat of the truck standing upright. He fidgeted with the small rear sliding window. At this point there several officers surround the truck, most of which were shouting at the driver to show his hands. He ignored them, and was able to slide the window open and weasel his way out of the truck. For some reason, upon exiting he tried to run. He didn’t get far before he was grabbed and taken to the ground with ease.

The fire department showed up within about 5 minutes and lifted the truck off the passenger, who was now completely limp. I quickly patted him down while the paramedics strapped him to a gurney. He was taken to the hospital where a doctor gave him a 1 in 10 chance of living. I called the hospital about 6 hours after this whole fiasco ended and a nurse told me he had a collapsed lung, lacerated kidney and liver, several broken ribs, lacerations to his arms, back, and head. He was being kept alive by a ventilator.

In the end, 6 stolen stereos, a gun, 3 stolen speakers and two stolen cell phones were recovered from the truck. When the truck was stolen, it had a camper shell on it that was obviously removed. The driver had a receipt in his pants pocket from a junkyard where he had pawned the camper shell for $600. We never did figure out where all the Gatorade came from. Maybe the two knocked off a delivery truck? Maybe they just got really thirsty when they were driving around all night, stealing other people’s stuff.

Who knows….

Torched Porsche

Stolen 2007 Porsche Cayenne Turbo…. torched by it’s thieves.

Here we go.

So this is my first attempt at any sort of web publishing. Originally I bought a journal and began writing my stories down the old fashioned way. I finally realized that writing my experiences in a hard bound book I bought at Barnes and Noble was exactly that… Old Fashioned.

I’ve been employed by a large police department for about a year and a half now. Minus my 6 months of academy training, I’ve been in the field working patrol, for about a year now. I’m still very much a “rookie”.

Regardless of my rank or time on the job, I experience things on a daily basis, that if most people say once in their lifetime, they would never forget. That’s why I’ve decided to start an online journal of all the things we as patrol officers experience.

It’s all in a night’s work for me, so enjoy….