A man tried to steal a truck while its owner was still in it, led police on a sprawling chase through Los Angeles, shrugged off a PIT maneuver, avoided spike strips, and still managed to lose to a dog. It was, by any reasonable measure, not a well-executed plan. The incident unfolded on a Friday afternoon when a suspect approached Ronald Knesil in the parking lot of the China Cook restaurant in Fontana, California, first asking him for a ride. Knesil declined, turned toward the back of his own truck, and was promptly relieved of his keys in a manner he had not anticipated.
What followed was not a clean getaway. Knesil, by his own account, was not inclined to simply hand over his vehicle. He struggled with the suspect inside the cab for roughly ten minutes before the suspect managed to get the truck started, put it in reverse, and accelerate out of the lot hard enough that Knesil lost his footing and fell from the moving vehicle. The truck clipped a curb, took out a sign, and disappeared into traffic. Knesil was left with scrapes on his elbow and, presumably, a story he will be telling for a very long time.
Fontana Police picked up the pursuit almost immediately, which was the first piece of good news in an otherwise chaotic afternoon. The chase moved quickly onto the 10 Freeway, then the 101, at which point the California Highway Patrol took over as the suspect crossed into the greater Los Angeles area. From there, the route wound through the 5 Freeway southbound in East L.A., then onto the 710 southbound, covering a significant stretch of Southern California freeway in a stolen pickup truck. At various points during the chase, the suspect was observed driving on the wrong side of the road, navigating through congested surface streets, and making what witnesses described as hand signs through the window. None of this is standard driving behavior, even by Southern California standards…