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Surprised police officers watched in embarrassment Sunday as a woman they’d arrested only moments earlier took off in their cruiser through the Chatham-Kent countryside.
It was a Houdini-like escape that began near Wallaceburg around noon on Sunday.
That’s when a young officer arrested a woman he found slumped over inside a car parked in the middle of Base Line Road in Wallaceburg, said Chatham-Kent police Staff Sgt. Don Vitek.
The woman was placed in the back of the police car, her hands cuffed behind her, after the officer found her with a bottle of alcohol, Vitek said.
As the officer spoke with witnesses, the woman slipped her hands over her feet in front of her.
She squeezed through the partition — about 30 centimetres wide — that separates the police car’s front and back seats.
“She was a very small-statured person,” he said.
The woman then took off in the cruiser — its rooftop lights still flashing — in front of the officer investigating the scene and a second officer who had arrived shortly after.
“You can imagine what they were saying to each other. Nobody could believe it,” Vitek said.
The woman drove about seven kilometres before crashing the police car into the Snye River, near Bluewater Line, during the high-speed chase.
“We were pursuing our own cruiser at that point,” he said.
The officer whose car had been stolen then had to rescue the woman, who was still handcuffed, from the middle of the river after she tried to swim away.
“She wasn’t going to make it across,” Vitek said.
No one was injured during the incident, he said.
But the “rookie” officer — a two-year member of the Chatham-Kent force — was “embarrassed” that someone had stolen his cruiser, Vitek said.
About $6,000 in damage was done to the police car.
While prisoners have escaped from the back of police cruisers before, no one had ever made off with one of the vehicles before, Vitek said.
A 22-year-old woman who lives on Walpole Island faces several criminal charges, including impaired driving, failing to provide a breath sample for analysis, escaping custody, theft, possessing stolen property, dangerous driving and obstructing justice by providing an improper name, police said.
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