ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 25, 1997 TAG: 9702250119
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
That was no cop with the flashing blue light zooming in and out of traffic on U.S. 460 in Roanoke and Botetourt counties a couple of Saturdays back.
That was a pack of prank-pulling high schoolers out on the town with dad's portable blue light.
The real police, who think the incident may be related to a series of similar reports last summer, aren't taking the prank lightly. The Botetourt County Sheriff's Office charged the trio - ages 14, 16 and 17 - with impersonating a police officer, a misdemeanor. The boys names weren't released because they are juveniles.
One man who got forced off the road on his way home to Blue Ridge after a 12-hour shift at Roanoke Electric Steel didn't share the kids' sense of humor, either.
"He was bound and determined he was going to find out where they were going and call the police when he got there," said Botetourt Sheriff's Deputy David Blessard. "He was irate."
It was about 9:30 p.m. on Feb. 15 when the man was passed by the teen-agers near the Race Track gas station on U.S. 460 in Roanoke, Blessard said. The deputy would not release the man's name.
The man followed the white car with two large antennas on it, along with a second car that was traveling with it, for more than 10 miles as they headed east on 460. Every time the teen-agers came upon a pack of cars, they flipped on the blue light, Blessard said.
"They were using the light to just bully their way through traffic, more or less," the deputy said.
When the two cars pulled into the Stonehaven subdivision in Blue Ridge, near the Bedford County line, the man who tailed them called police from a convenience store.
Blessard and deputies Matt Ward and David Scott found the cars at the last house in the subdivision, the home of a friend of the three teens, Blessard said. They denied it at first, but a 16-year-old from Hardy and a 14-year-old from Roanoke admitted they had been using the blue light in the white car.
The 17-year-old from Roanoke in the brown sedan, which Blessard said also looked like an unmarked police car, admitted he'd used the blue light in the white car on a few other occasions, too.
The light apparently belonged to the 16-year-old's father, a U.S. Postal Service inspector from Hardy.
"It was one of those `Kojak' lights," Blessard said, referring to the 1970s police drama. It's a teardrop-shaped sphere with a rotating light on it, which plugs into a car's cigarette lighter.
Many of the details of what happened Feb. 15, however, bear a resemblance to a number of reports from the same stretch of 460 last summer, Blessard said. He hopes to locate witnesses to those episodes to determine if the same kids were involved.
Several motorists reported being forced off the road by a white Chevrolet Cavalier with a blue light on its dash board. The boys charged in the most recent incident were driving a white Pontiac Sunbird, which is identical to a Cavalier except for the name, Blessard said.
"I don't take it personally," he said. "I worry about the safety of those kids."
Witnesses to incidents on U.S. 460 similar to those described in this story are asked to contact the Botetourt County Sheriff's Office at (540) 473-8230.
LENGTH: Medium: 64 linesby CNB