THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 30, 1995 TAG: 9501300135
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: Hot Pursuit - Or Not?
SOURCE: BY STEVE STONE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 117 lines
Many times, high-speed chases work.
That's why police are reluctant to adopt policies restricting them. Indeed, some officers say privately that the problem is not that they pursue, but that they do not pursue vigorously enough.
Locally, police have nabbed rapists, drug dealers, habitual drunken drivers, armed-robbery suspects and numerous hard-core criminals through pursuits. They've even nabbed murderers who might otherwise have escaped.
One of the more notorious murders in Virginia Beach - the stabbing death of a teacher by one of her students - was solved largely because of a high-speed pursuit that began when a state trooper saw a car driving erratically.
Trooper S.H. Lynch was heading home in his cruiser in the early-morning hours of April 24, 1982, when he saw the car. When he tried to stop it, the driver hit the gas.
The chase through the Green Run neighborhood lasted four minutes and hit speeds of 80 mph. It ended when the driver lost control and crashed.
Lynch ran to the overturned car and helped a youth out who claimed that the driver was ``hurt bad.'' He took the teenager, Paul Garnett, 18, to his cruiser.
Suspicious of Garnett's story - it appeared that the teenager had been driving - Lynch went back to the car to check the woman. As he did, the teenager bolted.
Concerned for the badly injured woman, Lynch stayed with her. Paramedics arrived and found that her injuries were not from the wreck - she had been stabbed several times.
The woman, Cynthia Henley, 30, died a short time later in a hospital.
Garnett, who was caught by Chesapeake police a few hours later, was convicted of her murder and remains in prison.
Other such examples of successful high-speed pursuits abound. Some examples from the past year:
Jan. 18 - At 2:15 a.m., a state trooper saw two men breaking a window at a store in the Parkview Auto Center in the 1600 block of S. Military Highway across the street from the Virginia State Police 5th Division headquarters in Chesapeake.
After stealing merchandise, the men took off in a Honda. The trooper pursued and the driver refused to pull over. Chesapeake and Norfolk police joined the pursuit as the car raced into Virginia Beach and Norfolk.
The 10-minute chase, at speeds up to 75 mph, ended when the car crashed into a utility pole north of Norview Avenue.
The men fled, but one was captured seconds after he started running. The other was caught a short time later.
Nearly $900 in equipment taken during the robbery is recovered.
Charges: Burglary, grand larceny, reckless driving, eluding.
March 20 - State police clocked a vehicle going 92 mph on Interstate 64 on the Peninsula. When a trooper pulled behind the vehicle, it sped up even more.
A second state trooper joined the chase and positioned his cruiser in front of the car. The rolling roadblock forced the car to slow and finally stop. The chase had gone two miles in less than two minutes.
Charges: DUI, reckless driving, speeding.
May 7 - A vehicle is clocked by radar going 81 mph in I-64 on the Peninsula.
A state police trooper caught up to the vehicle, but the driver refused to stop and instead used the shoulder lane to avoid being stopped.
The car sped into the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel and continued, passing vehicles illegally.
After exiting the tunnel, the trooper got directly behind the car and it finally stopped. The 10-mile pursuit lasted eight minutes.
Charges: DUI and reckless driving.
June 4 - About 9 p.m., two men entered the Kmart store in the 200 block of West Mercury Blvd. in Hampton and demanded money. The men were given several bags containing a large amount of money and fled.
Witnesses said the men got into a green Ford Aerostar van, which was spotted by a Hampton police officer as it headed onto I-64.
With three Hampton police cars in pursuit, the van moved toward exits several times, but each time was swerved back onto the interstate.
As they reached the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, the van was traveling at up to 95 mph.
Hampton police alerted Norfolk police by radio, and Norfolk units were waiting at their end of the tunnel to take up the chase.
The van headed toward the Tidewater Drive south exit on I-64, but it clipped a road sign and skidded off the left side of the road. The two suspects fled.
A revolver and some of the stolen money were recovered.
June 29 - When a state trooper tried to pull over a pickup operating illegally in the high-occupancy vehicle lane of the Virginia Beach-Norfolk Expressway, the driver took off.
He exited the expressway and tried to shake the trooper by traveling on numerous city streets. The 10-minute, five-mile chase ended when he was finally stopped at Independence Boulevard and Bonney Road in Virginia Beach.
When the pickup was searched, police found 121 grams of marijuana and a small amount of cocaine.
Charges: Possession with intent to distribute, possession of cocaine, resisting arrest, HOV violation, failure to wear a seatbelt, driving with a suspended license and eluding.
July 14 - A state trooper spotted a man driving erratically, weaving between two lanes, of the expressway near Witchduck Road in Virginia Beach. When the trooper turned on his lights and siren, the man drove off.
The driver finally pulled over on I-64 near Indian River Road .
Charges: Drunken driving, refusal to take a blood alcohol test.
July 27 - Dispatchers had broadcast an alert to be on the lookout for a stolen 1993 Ford Explorer. Shortly after that, a Greensville County deputy sheriff spotted the vehicle on I-95 northbound.
A state trooper picked up the pursuit, which went for six miles and lasted nine minutes. It ended in a parking lot off U.S. Route 301, where four men jumped out of the vehicle and ran. Two were caught later that day, and the other two were caught later.
Charges: Armed robbery, car theft and other charges filed in North Carolina. MEMO: Main story on page A1 and related stories on pages A6 and A7.
KEYWORDS: HIGH SPEED CHASE by CNB