Last Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, for the first time in a while, we covered one of those helicopter incidents – a law-enforcement chopper overhead a south West Seattle neighborhood for quite some time, leaving hundreds of people wondering “what’s going on?” Two hours after the first report, we finally got police information on what had happened – described at the time as a stolen-car case, with three arrests. Now we have the actual report from that incident, found in the latest stack of scanned reports we downloaded at the precinct tonight, so we wanted to share the details in case you’d been wondering:

The report says it all started with an officer on patrol in the 1800 block of Roxbury (map), spotting a car “approaching (him) quickly from the rear),” going up to 15 mph faster than the officer. The car, described as a green 1997 Honda Civic, got up behind the officer, “quickly slowed and did not pass,” even though the officer slowed all the way down to 20 mph, the car wouldn’t pass.

When the car turned southbound onto 16th, he followed. Checking its plates, he discovered they were canceled and replaced. As the car continued onto 98th and then north on 15th, the officer turned on his lights and siren, but it didn’t stop. It ran two stop signs, speeding and otherwise breaking traffic laws, “but was not wildly out of control,” the officer wrote. The officer continued following it through a circle involving 10th, Elmgrove, 11th and Thistle – repeatedly.

At one point, the car briefly stopped and a teenage girl got out and ran. The car then stopped in the intersection of 10th and Elmgrove, when someone else got out of the car. The officer stopped and questioned him, and he denied having any knowledge of the car, eventually claiming he had just been dropped off by a bus at 140th in Burien and was walking to downtown. “I pointed out that he was miles from 140th in Burien and was walking the wrong way to get to downtown,” the officer wrote. Meantime, another officer found the girl seen getting out of the car earlier, who said she was dating the guy who also had been questioned. The guy changed his story and claimed he’d been picked up at a park and ride in Burien by a friend he didn’t know well, and eventually got out of the car when he realized it was stolen. He told the officer the driver was “an active Asian gang member.”

The car, meantime, was still out and about, finally abandoned around SW 97th and 30th SW (map). Officers found two males running from the area. One had a meth pipe, one a screwdriver, and were both believed to be members of a local gang.

Yet more investigation revealed the car was stolen in Seattle, and had been fitted with license plates stolen from Federal Way. The helicopter got involved in this point, according to the report, along with a K-9 team, but they never found the driver. The suspects who were arrested — all teenagers — may face charges including eluding police, possession of stolen property, and drug violations.

(We’re still looking through the other reports we downloaded and will share anything else we find of note.)