Patrolling a strip of fast-food restaurants in Memphis, two officers spotted a known car thief pulling out from a drive-through window in a car they suspected didn’t belong to him. At about the same time, the suspect spotted the patrol unit.
He took off. The cops hit their lights and sirens and started the pursuit.
“We are in pursuit . . . possible stolen vehicle . . . southbound on Washington . . . now heading south onto Adams Street.”
“This kid was runnin’,” remembers Sergeant Keith Haney of the Memphis Police Department. “We’d dealt with him on numerous occasions in the past, but he was still a minor then, and the courts would let him off easy. He knew this, so whenever he’d steal a car, he would always go for broke when he was being chased by the police. He was a real cocky kid, too. But this was the first time we’d ever been after him since he turned eighteen. Now he was an adult—and could be tried as one.”
“Suspect just took out part of a fence at Garden and Greenlawn and is now going the wrong way on Lincoln Avenue.”
This was one car thief who was determined not to be caught. For a good twenty minutes he sped through stop signs and red lights, down side streets and back alleys. Finally, surrounded by police units, he abandoned the car and attempted to flee on foot. The officers caught him before he had run twenty yards.
The next day, the new adult was taken to Haney’s office for questioning.
“You’ve got the wrong man,” the kid stated boldly. Apparently, he had spent the long night in jail strategizing about how he was going to get out of this one.
“Really?” the sergeant responded. He glanced down at the arrest record. “They identified you in a car that didn’t belong to you, chased you for seven miles, then arrested you right after you exited the vehicle. Of course it was you.”
The thief shook his head back and forth. “There’s no way they could have identified me,” he said cockily.
“And why is that?” Haney asked.
“I was wearing a baseball cap,” he sneered. “And the windows of the car were tinted.”