Fool on the hill

| Crime | Gatewood | Seen around town

(PHOTOS ADDED BELOW @ 7:45 PM) WSB reader Venkat sends along the story of someone whose erratic drive up and down the Gatewood Hill stretch of Cali apparently didn’t go too well:

We were having coffee at Ladro when we saw a car with a flat tire driving along. Didn’t think anything of it, and about 2 minutes later saw sirens going the opposite direction. About 10 minutes later, after finishing up coffee, we saw police cars towards the Thriftway, when we took a look, sure enough it was the flat tire car, with the driver in the back of the police car (i.e., in custody).

When we were headed back home, up California (towards Thistle) we saw a sign had been knocked down. I thought I saw a wheel mark on the lawn of the sidewalk. We talked to some of the neighbors and someone drove their car around 70 mph, up the sidewalk, knocked over a street sign, crashed into a generator, and drove off down to Ladro (where we saw the car).

I think no injuries were sustained (except for the transformer, and someone’s railing and front yard) but it was an odd incident.

7:45 PM UPDATE: Finally found the spot after our second drive-by along the hill. Note in the second photo, the offending vehicle left something telltale behind.

—

Lou August 25, 2007 (4:24 pm)

I drove by Thriftway just past 10am and there were 3 cop cars surrounding this beat up white car sitting in the middle of the northbound lane with a flat tire.

Without knowing any of these details it definitely looked like someone was chased by the cops or otherwise driver illegaly (ie, it all looked suspicious). Thanks WSB and the fellow reader for filling in the details.

pam August 26, 2007 (7:16 am)

That was no generator, that was my neighborhood cable hub! We lost our connection to the grid yesterday around the time this wacky – and thankfully not dangerous to wandering critters and humans – incident took place. When I called Comcast they mentioned an “outage in the area” but didn’t know why. WSB knows all.

WSB August 26, 2007 (10:19 am)

This is the best thing about being a neighborhood info hub — people e-mail, or post comments, with ‘here’s what I saw’ and ‘here’s what I heard’ and between all that, even if the official sources aren’t talking, we all can generally put together the pieces of the puzzle. In fact, that’s why we missed the “crime scene” on our first drive-by yesterday afternoon – we saw the Comcast truck and those are so common (here an outage, there an outage, everywhere an outage-outage), we thought ‘nah, that couldn’t be it.’

Sorry, comment time is over.