Page 302 - NIXBOOK

A woman caused a car crash by running a red light in an intersection; cross traffic had to slam on brakes to avoid hitting her,
causing a rear-ender accident. Woman at fault kept going but her plate was recorded by a witness and I found her and cited her
for reckless driving. She was 60-something years old with a clean driving record, so the charge would not have been too harsh
for her record or insurance rates. But she decided she wanted to fight the charge, so she got her day in court and her attorney
had to try and explain that although yes, the woman had driving through the red light and caused an accident it wasn’t really
legally “reckless.” The jury disagreed and found her guilty. The penalty was still quite minimal; but the woman had rather
stupidly paid several thousand dollars for legal representation that she didn’t really need, and didn’t work out for her anyway.

24 year old guy, driving his sister’s car, forgot how to drive and he smashed into another car and he then quickly made the
horrible decision to just flee the scene. He drove past a responding police car and then he decided he definitely did not want to
talk to the police either; which added a pursuit charge onto the hit and run charge. His trying to outrun the police idea would
have worked better had he not gone down a dead end road. Before the pursuing officer could catch up to him, the kid jumped
out of his car and ran on foot into the woods, disregarding the police officer’s yelled commands to stop running. The kid had
enough of a head start to get away from the officer and he disappeared into the woods. I arrived a minute later and surveyed the
area; the guy had lucked out with a pretty expansive area of woodland to run into; a good square kilometer of solid trees and
bushes, complete with huge gullies and hills. I found a nearby power line access road that was clear enough to walk uphill; I
walked up 300 yards and found a side trail around the same time and place that I thought I heard some sticks breaking nearby
in the woods. I went about 50 feet onto the trail and stopped. Silence. Must have been a bird, I thought. I stood and stared
around for awhile; concluding that if the guy laid low, we would absolutely never find him. As I turned to leave, I suddenly saw
the guy, not 40 feet away from me. He was crouched down, praying that I would not see him. If he had been behind the big tree
instead of in front, I never would have seen him. I took him into custody and then he went off to jail. I later measured the
distance online; he had run a third of a mile through the thick woods..and stopped running right in the one exact area where I
wound up randomly walking to, a third of a mile away from the ditched car. I will readily admit that it was just dumb luck on
my part catching him; no real skill was involved in that one! My first words to him when I saw him: “It is just not your day,
huh?”

The scene is: my patrol car. In the car wash. The kind where you drive onto the track and your car gets rolled through and past
the brushes and water jets and I leaned too far forward while cleaning the dashboard and hit the horn with all the gear on my
load-bearing tactical vest. But this was my brand new patrol car that had the old horn-is-actually-a-siren sound effect
modification, so what happened was my siren immediately activated. Say, do you want to guess how loud a siren is, in a car
wash? Well I can attest it’s pretty fucking loud. My car was so new to me that I had not even realized the horn was actually a
siren, so in an effort to turn it off I hit the horn again, which did not in fact turn it off; it just cycled it into a different siren sound.
Each successive frantic pound on the steering wheel only changed the siren sound; it would not turn off. In near panic I finally
found the siren off switch on the control box near the police radio console, and finally the siren shut off. Now in the middle of
all of that, the car wash girl figured I had just got dispatched to some kind of major emergency and couldn’t wait to get out of
there, so she turned the whole car wash abuptly off, complete with an its own loud buzzer warning sound. When she came in
to check on me, I sheepishly admitted I had accidently set off the siren and there was no problem, really. I felt quite bad for the
poor driver who had been right in front of me in the car wash; I was going to apologize profusely to him or her after I got out
but whoever was in that car did not stick around; they immediately left the second they could get out of there past the dryer.