It seems that some people go out of their way to get into trouble. That’s more or less what happened the night that Nashville Police Officer Floyd A. Hyde unexpectedly became involved in a high-speed chase.
“I was en route to a personal-injury accident in West Nashville, and to get there I had to enter Interstate 40 from I-440. As I merged, blue lights and sirens going, I fell in behind a gold Pontiac Firebird that suddenly seemed to sprout wings and take off down the interstate. The driver apparently panicked at the sight of me. He accelerated to more than a hundred miles per hour and began passing cars on the shoulder. It was obvious that he thought I was after him and was making a run for it.”
But Hyde couldn’t give chase, despite the driver’s reckless behavior. Injured people always take priority over traffic offenders, so the officer had to stay en route to the accident. But he did try to keep the Firebird in sight as he drove, hoping another nearby unit would be able to step in and stop the speeding vehicle. As it turned out, keeping the Pontiac in sight was not that difficult. Every turn the Pontiac made was the very turn the officer needed to get to the accident scene.
“I saw fire billowing out from underneath that car, with blue smoke and oil going everywhere. He’d blown his engine. Now he had to stop.”
Hyde followed the Pontiac all the way to his destination. At that point he found another unit had already arrived at the accident scene. His help wasn’t needed. Now he was free to try to stop the nut in the Firebird, who by this time had developed something new to panic about.
“Just about the time my priorities changed,” Hyde says, “I saw fire billowing out from underneath that car, with blue smoke and oil going everywhere. He’d blown his engine. Now he had to stop.
“After I arrested him, I asked him why he was running. He told me he had a suspended driver’s license. When I told him that I hadn’t been after him in the first place, that I would have simply gone around him if he hadn’t taken off like that, and that I wouldn’t have caught him if he hadn’t made every turn I needed to make—well, he got pretty upset.”
That incident cost the driver of the Firebird plenty—a thousand dollars for the new engine plus the expense of having his car towed—not to mention the charges for driving with a suspended license, attempting to elude, and reckless driving.