Erratic driver flees traffic stop — but can’t evade sharp-eyed sheriff, Florida cops say
When an accused intoxicated driver sped away from deputies in Florida, he may have thought he was in the clear.
Instead, he was about to pass the county sheriff.
A red Chevrolet pickup truck was seen driving recklessly on Interstate 95 on March 5 when someone called deputies to report the driver, according to a news release from the Volusia Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies tried to pull the driver over, they said, but instead of stopping on the side of the road, the driver took off “at a high speed.”
As deputies started to chase the driver, Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood was leaving an elementary school where he had been reading to students and heard the chase in progress over the law enforcement scanner, he told WOFL.
“I’m like, right here. I mean, if he continues north on I-95, I mean, he’s, he has to go by me. We’re going to make sure we get him,” the sheriff told the outlet.
Chitwood began coordinating with deputies to get ahead of the driver, the sheriff’s office said, before he spotted the red pickup truck.
A deputy threw out stop sticks that hit the front of the truck’s bumper and didn’t pop the tires, but the driver pulled off the road anyway, the sheriff’s office said.
Chitwood was close-by and ran to the driver’s side door to pull the driver out of the truck, deputies said.
“It’s flashbacks. It’s like I used to do this for a living. I wasn’t the sheriff. I wasn’t the police chief. I used to be a real, live cop who locked up people, and investigated crimes, and worked in narcotics,” Chitwood told WOFL.
The driver, later identified as a 27-year-old man from Pennsylvania, was unable to stand up, slurred his words and told deputies he hadn’t seen any lights on their vehicles, according to body camera footage shared by the sheriff’s office.
Inside his truck they found Xanax pills and cocaine as wells as bloody syringes with a rubber strap, the sheriff’s office said.
“You have to do something. There are too many innocent lives,” Chitwood told WOFL. “And this guy was all over. He was going from guardrail to guardrail.”
The driver was charged with driving under the influence, possession of crack cocaine, possession of alprazolam and possession of narcotics paraphernalia, the sheriff’s office said, and additional charges are expected from the Florida Highway Patrol and New Smyrna Beach Police Department.
Volusia County is about 100 miles south of Jacksonville.
This story was originally published March 6, 2024 at 11:40 AM with the headline "Erratic driver flees traffic stop — but can’t evade sharp-eyed sheriff, Florida cops say."
