In LA, we had TWO low-speed chases in one day. This morning, as I was going out the door, one of the local affiliates showed a Doritos truck that two guys had jacked. The driver (who I’m sure will not work for Frito-Lay again) had left the keys in it while delivering to a stop’n’rob. The two clowns drove it around for half an hour, giving Doritos a lot of free publicity. They were just surrendering when I had to leave.
Then at dinnertime, a van was being chased from Baldwin Park, where the driver had robbed a store, to Covina, and around again and again, in decreasing circles, mostly on the 10. It went on for 4 1/2 hours (as the handy counter in the upper-right corner of the screen told us) until it ran out of gas.
Ten cop cars lined up a ways behind him, with another on the surface street, and two snipers behind the freeway barrier. The driver wouldn’t surrender or even communicate, and unless he’s done so while I was posting this, still hasn’t. He smeared something on the inside of his windows so no one could see in. The SWAT team sent in some kind of robot to investigate: no word on what info it’s gathered. Traffic is backed up to forever, and I am infinitely grateful that Mr. Rilch isn’t stuck in it.
From what was said at the 11 o’clock news, he still hadn’t surrendered, and had knocked over the bot the SWAT team had sent in.
I was watching Fox News when he surrendered and got a good laugh when the driver ran out of gas, stopped his van, then flipped off the helicopters–which prompted the female newscaster to say, “well, that was an interesting gesture.”
The Powers That Be should just go on and put together The Car Chase Channel. They’d show live broadcasts of car chases from around the country, along with reruns of those “World’s Worst Drivers” shows from TLC.
I watched it up until FOX broke away for Teenapalooza. At first I was put out that The Simpsons were pre-empted, but, I admit it, I soon became enthralled. I’d’ve stayed up all night watching if FOX had kept airing it.
We just don’t have this kind of thing in Oregon. News is actually boring up here. Until we got Dish Network, the only real-live car chase I’d ever seen broadcast was OJ’s. One of these days we’ll switch our subscription over to local broadcast channels and be able to watch our Simpsons reruns uninterrupted
The stand-off finally ended around 2am. They’d tried a robot (he kicked it over) and tear gas, but whart finally ended it is what always tends to: cops saw him brandish his weapon, and they started shooting. Stunningly enough, they didn’t kill him.
What was particularly bizarre is the chase was all over my frickin’ neighborhood. The hubby was on his way home and had to pull over while the van, swarm of cars, and helicopters buzzed by. I turned on the TV to see him take the freeway ramp just about a mile and a half from my house and then follow my frickin’ route to work for a while before looping around and yet again head toward my neighborhood.
I heard helicopters at 1:30am loudly buzzing by–ugh. I think it may have been them coming home, who knows.
JavaMaven, I too was watching Fox and had a chuckle over “that was an interesting gesture…” I’m just amazed that there was a pursuit that all the news channels finally gave up on.
Oh, Rilch, the FritoLay truck–the news this morning said it was driven by a couple of kids who “wanted to get on TV.” Now there’s an ambition…
