Well, there was something you don’t see every day. Actually, I see a lot less crime since I moved from the ghetto house.

I was driving home to lunch yesterday, minding my own business. Right at the spot where my road home fronts the freeway for a little bit before going over it, there was suddenly a giant dirt cloud in the equipment yard between the road and the freeway. I looked over, and there was a Highway Patrol hot on the ass of an SUV, which had just blown through the chain link fence at a high rate of speed. Now, to get the way they were going, they would have had to flip an extremely fast U-turn off the freeway exit, have been travelling excessively fast down the other end of the frontage road, or have been going the wrong way on the freeway. I don’t know which; I only saw it from the fence-smashing on.

The other cars and I slowed down to gawk. I saw the SUV swing around the one building on the lot and someone jump out of the car and run. Well, that was fairly stupid of them, as there’s nowhere to run to there. A cop was running around the building after him, but the SUV had continued its swing around the lot and was more or less headed towards me. The next thing I knew, that SUV had blown through another section of chain link fence right behind me, trying to get out on the road where I was. Apparently it didn’t make it, because the driver wasw running towards me. I was busily rolling up windows and locking doors, but as far as I could see, there wasn’t another cop on the scene yet. So I flipped on my caution lights because I’ll be damned if I was going to go anywhere, and yanked out my cell phone and called 911.

I got right down to the point with the 911 operator, and she obviously was aware of what was going on because she didn’t ask me to back up and slow down like they usually do. I was watching the guy run across the field, away from me at this point, and towards the livestock auction/flea market. So I kept up a running commentary to the operator, giving as good a description of the guy as I could. I could hear her relaying my information and sure enough, here comes another cop on foot floowing the guy across the field. Some more cops from the local police were driving around into the flea market area, but by then the guy had ducked behind a semi trailer and I couldn’t see him any more. It wasn’t flea market day so there weren’t as many people there as there could have been. I hope they got him.

The operator finally got my name and thanked me, and I got off the phone and went home and had lunch. As I went over the freeway, I could look down into the yard and see that the first cop had the first runner down on the ground. By the time I drove back, there were ten assorted police cars there, the SUV was all open like it had been searched, and the cops were standing around unexcited. I considered stopping in and telling them I was their RP and seeing what had happened, but they probably hate that. I may see it in the paper today, or I may never know. One of the cops I saw was a guy I’d just seen an hour before when I was reading the water meter at their hangar, so maybe I can ask him. Still, it was a fairly exciting interlude to a regular day of water meter reading. It probably would have been smartest just to drive my truck on out of there when I saw the guy running toward me, but if everyone did that, this world would be a pretty miserable place. Someone’s got to stand behind the good guys.

Edited to add a link to the story in the local paper.