A 25-year-old woman in Spokane thought she could outrun the law on a Wednesday afternoon. What she didn’t account for was the eye in the sky watching her every turn. The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office used its Air 1 helicopter to track the fleeing driver rather than putting deputies in a high-speed car chase, a decision that likely prevented things from getting far worse than they already did.
The incident kicked off around 3:20 p.m. near East Sprague Avenue and South Custer Road, when a deputy flipped on his emergency lights to pull the woman over for reckless driving. She did not pull over. She did the opposite of pulling over. What followed was a sprawling, tire-shredding, bumper-bashing series of very bad decisions that ended with her on foot, caught, and booked into the Spokane County Jail.
From start to finish, this story has it all: a fleeing SUV, spike strips, a road rage subplot involving a truck driver, and a finale where the suspect tried to squeeze her car through a red-light intersection and slammed into three other vehicles. Nobody at that intersection needed it…