|
|
Posted by David Sherman [24.32.202.83] on Friday, February 05, 2010 at 22:23:29 :
Lots of excitement in Wallace this afternoon. A guy in a red Mustang with Washington plates comes zooming down the main street with half a dozen cops from all jurisdictions in hot pursuit. I go out to the corner of my building to watch the show and pretty soon he's heading back my way aiming to go the wrong way on the one way street at high speed. This ticks me off so I walk out into the street in front of him hoping he'll stop, slow down, get confused, spin out or something, but he's heading right for me like I'm not even there so I jump out of the way. Pretty soon he's coming back around the other way with his right front tire blown out. Still, he manages to lead the cops around just about every street in town once, and some of them two or three times riding on the rim. I guess that's one advantage of those expensive big wheels with the thin tires -- they act like run-flats. In the course of the pursuit, two of the cops run into each other, but speed racer keeps on going. Finally he fishtails in the middle of downtown, hits a parked car, the sheriff hits him with his truck and the standoff begins. Cops show up with M16s and order him out, but his car with his own pistol pointed at his own head, so they can't exactly shoot him, even though that seems to be what he wants. By now everybody in town is watching because it's the most exciting cop activity since the famous shootout at the Eagles Lodge, which only the real old-timers remember. Eventually the guy gets out of his car but he's still standing there with, from what I could see, his pistol pointing up at his chin, but some people say it was a shotgun. Super skinny guy with no shirt on. At some point the gun went off (sounded like a pistol to me), the round didn't hit anybody, and the cops tackled him. The word is the chase started in Coeur d'Alene, 50 miles away. I'm not sure why he picked Wallace to exit the freeway or what he was fleeing from, but we sure got something to see this afternoon. I could certainly be wrong about this, but whenever I see a super skinny guy with loads of energy, I think methamphetamines. When he's driving around like a bat out of hell with his shirt off in mid-winter, it adds to that opinion. Thankfully nobody got hurt (school had just let out and from what I saw he would have run over kids without even seeing them), but we've got at least one wrecked parked car, a wrecked county cop car and wrecked Forest Service cop car. He went around my building so many times I was afraid he was going to cut through my parking lot and run into one of my trucks, but he didn't. I'll probably find out tomorrow what the story is on why they were after him. I hope he committed some big serious crime before they started chasing him because nothing he did in town is likely to put him away for a long time, but he's sure nobody that should ever be allowed behind a steering wheel again.
Follow Ups: