Early Thursday morning, several East Ridge police officers narrowly avoided being struck by a pickup truck after attempting to detain its driver.
According to a police report, an officer stopped at the McDonald’s on Ringgold Road at about 2 a.m. to investigate a truck that had been parked on the side of the building for quite some time. The officer ran the tag on the Chevy pickup before approaching the driver and asking to speak to him. The tag on the truck came back as possibly having been stolen out of Chattanooga.
The report states as the officer attempted to speak with the driver, a white male in his late 40s or early 50s, he refused to roll down his window. “He appeared to be extremely agitated and would not comply with anything I requested him to do,” the officer wrote in the report.
The driver told the officer that the truck was his brother’s and he was waiting for him to arrive. The driver told the officer he had been waiting there about 40 minutes for his brother.
According to the report, a few minutes later, dispatch confirmed the tag on the truck was reported stolen. The officer told the driver that he had one chance to exit the vehicle “and gave him several commands to open the door and step out of the vehicle.”
When a second officer tried to open the vehicle door, the driver reportedly threw his phone and started the truck. “Officer Allison struck the driver side window several times with his collapsible baton failing to gain entry,” the report states.
The driver then put the truck into drive and hit the accelerator causing the truck to spin the rear tires and go up on the curb, the report states. “The driver nearly struck Officer Allison, Hawks, Fults and myself with the truck, placing each officer in fear for the their safety and lives,” the report states.
The reporting officer said that he had to make “extreme effort” to avoid being struck by the vehicle.
The truck accelerated at a high speed out of the parking lot with police chasing, the report states. East Ridge officers pursued the truck north on Interstate 75 to Interstate 24 west bound. The pursuit continued as the truck left the interstate northbound on Germantown to Tunnel Boulevard. Police terminated the pursuit on North Chamberlain Avenue due to officer and public safety, the report states. The Tennessee Highway Patrol and Hamilton County Sheriff’s Department officers stayed in the area looking for the suspect vehicle, the report states.
_ 54 Frawley Rd.: Police were dispatched to the address Wednesday afternoon in reference to a burglary. According to a police report, the victim told officers that someone had entered her house between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. and took a flat screen television, a laptop computer and a lock box containing a .380 caliber pistol.
The victim told police that her security alarm company never notified her of the burglary. The report states that investigators discovered a box on the side of the house where the security system had been installed had been tampered with. The alarm system showed that the system was disconnected at 9:18 a.m. The report states that a security camera at the front door was not set up to record. Police concluded there was no forced entry into the house. The report states that it appeared the thief entered the residence through an unlocked window in a back bedroom. A shoe print was found outside the window and it appeared that the thief entered at that point and also made his exit from the window.
Investigators spoke with the residence in the other side of the duplex, who reported not seeing or hearing anything suspicious. There are no suspects at this time.
