(That’s a joke. It is not socially responsible to lead police on a high-speed chase.)
So tonight I was taking a late walk, and I heard a couple of sirens. Three cars came down the road perpendicular to the one I was on, the last two with flashers on. “Oh, they’re pulling that guy over,” thought I. But he wasn’t slowing down. “Oh, it’s a high speed chase!” thought I.
Just then the perp came to the intersection and turned onto my street. He sped past me. I turned around to see a third cruiser coming up the street toward the chase, and hang a U-turn.
I turned around, and watched as the perp sped off behind me. I swear, when he got to the next intersection, he signalled a left turn just before he made it! How funny is that? I thought, “Whoa, when the cops catch him, they’ll be charging him for a list of traffic infractions half a mile long, but Failure to Signal won’t be on it.”
About a minute later I saw some more cruisers headed south on the interstate. Could be a coincidence, or maybe he got on the freeway to try and escape. Let me guess what he’s thinking, “All I have to do is cross the state line and then I’ll be home free!” (The state line is only about five minutes from here, so if he tries to make it across, he’ll probably make it, for all the good it’ll do him.)
Sometimes I wonder what creeps into these people’s heads when they carry on a chase. Do they actually think that they’ll get away like they do in the movies?
Reminds me of a few years ago when my next door neighbor’s 17 year old son snapped (apparently he had been attending a funeral and was rather upset) and got himself caught up in a high-speed chase with the police.
What I remember most, is that I was at my grandmother’s house (a few miles from my home), watching the news of yet-another-high-speed-chase… not entirely paying attention to it. That is, when the reporter said my city’s name… and that the driver was actually pulling into a driveway. We all stopped to watch the footage, when I realized… hey… that’s my house right there! Right on cue, the telephone rings with my frantic mother yelling about "all the helicopters… oh, the police… oh god, people are on my lawn! I run home to see the police putting the kid into the back of a car, and taking him away. It was a media circus that night, with 4 local television stations parked around us.
What happened to the kid? The courts were actually rather lenient with him… I believe he had his license taken away until he was 18 and community service.
Sounds like he must have snapped. It doesn’t excuse what he did, but I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind doing it. I have always figured that most of these cases involved alcohol and/or street drugs. Some of them might just involve garden-variety idiots, I suppose.