It took about 11 hours, involved an aborted car chase, a jackknifed tractor trailer and breaking the window out of a stolen pick up truck, but the Princeton Mounties got their man.
And it all started with a phone call.
“This is a perfect example of why people need to call us,” said Princeton RCMP Corporal Chad Parsons. “She felt something was odd and she ended up contacting us.”
On February 8 at about 5:30 p.m. a woman reported a suspicious male at the Husky gas station on Highway 3.
She said the man attempted to sell her some tire chains that were in his Ford 150 pick-up truck.
Police quickly located the man, this time in the Chevron parking lot on the same road, but as they approached the suspect the truck took off at a high rate of speed.
“We didn’t pursue just because of the potential risk to the public,” said Parsons. “He was doing about 120 km an hour.”
Later in the night RCMP responded to a transport truck accident on Highway 3 near Manning Park. The officer on the scene recognized the stolen vehicle when the road was reopened and it passed through.
“The member followed the vehicle from a distance while making arrangements for a spike belt to be set up. The vehicle never made it to the spike belts so the member backtracked and looked in all the parking lots through Manning and found it, with a male slumped over in the truck sleeping.”
The suspect got a fast awakening when police smashed the window and placed the driver under arrest at about 4:30 a.m.
“It was a quick way to get the male in custody without posing further risk to the public,” said Parsons.
A 51-year-old man from Surrey faces charges of flight, causing pursuit and possession of stolen property.
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