This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: The Best Way to Get Caught
Four hundred Wednesdays. That is what we are looking at this week. We are celebrating four hundred posts of lawyers behaving badly, defendants behaving worse, creative and stupid lawsuits, and police forces around the world coming up with new ways to embarrass themselves and others. It is fair to say that the supply of weird and wacky legal news has not run dry, and there is no sign that it ever will.
For Volume 400 I wanted a theme that captures the spirit of this column. Our three stories this week meet the bill. Each one involves someone the police were trying to find. And each one is a study in how, no matter how creative the escape plan, the people doing the escaping tend to be their own biggest problem.
The Dukes of Hazzard Goes to Fond du Lac County
On May 9, a Wisconsin State Patrol officer pulled over a car near Fond du Lac. The stop was unremarkable until the officer learned there was an active felony warrant for the driver. Backup was requested. While that backup was arriving, the driver decided that this was a fine time to leave.
What followed was four and a half miles of pursuit. The driver, identified by police as Dewayne Stokes, lost control of his vehicle, went into a ditch, and then drove up an embankment. That embankment functioned, more or less, as a ramp. The car launched into the air, flew over another vehicle that happened to be on the road, cleared the road entirely, and came to rest in a field on the other side.
This was captured on dashcam. The footage shows something that looks much more like a stunt sequence than a routine traffic enforcement matter. The Fond du Lac County Sheriff’s Office released the video and it predictably went viral.
The remarkable part is that after his car finished its journey through the air, Stokes was still not interested in being arrested. He got out of the vehicle and had to be tasered before officers could take him into custody. He went to hospital with minor injuries, which is genuinely impressive given the circumstances. He was charged with seven counts including first-degree reckless endangering safety and two counts of eluding an officer.
The warrant Stokes was avoiding when this whole thing started was for failing to appear in court on a previous matter of operating a vehicle without the owner’s consent. He could have shown up to court but instead he showed up on national news.
Self-Igniting Getaway, Alabama Edition
About two weeks later, a different driver in Alabama tried a different approach. On the night of May 22, a high-speed chase that crossed two counties ended in Houston County, near Ashford, when the suspect’s vehicle caught fire.
So the fire is what ended the chase. The driver was travelling about 100 miles per hour, in an out-of-state vehicle, going west in the eastbound lanes of a four-lane highway. Officers were doing everything they could to keep other motorists out of the way and prevent a head-on collision. They were spared having to figure out how to safely stop a wrong-way driver doing triple digits, because the car simply burst into flames on its own.
The driver was taken into custody without further incident. The Houston County Sheriff personally responded to the scene, which gives you some sense of how seriously this was being treated. Late on Friday night it was unclear what had originally prompted the pursuit, and it was unclear what caused the fire. What was clear is that the laws of physics and combustion had stronger opinions about the situation than the driver did.
There is a reason police pursuit policies in BC and across Canada have tightened over the years. Pursuits of this kind, on the wrong side of a divided highway, are the sort of thing that gets innocent drivers killed. The fact that this one ended with no injuries owes more to luck than to anything anyone did on purpose.
Wanted Wednesdays Comes to Vermont
And then there is the third option. The one where you do not try to outrun anyone or set anything on fire. You just turn yourself in because the police have offered to buy you lunch.
On the very Wednesday this column is named for, the Morristown Police Department in Vermont posted on Facebook that they were looking for a particular wanted person. The twist is that they were offering five smash burgers and two chocolate shakes to anyone who could help them find her. Delivered discreetly, the post helpfully noted, if the tipster wished.
The woman turned herself in the next day.
This is part of an ongoing initiative the department calls Wanted Wednesdays. Lt. Todd Baxter, who runs the program, started it in 2023 with seven Shamrock Shakes for information about a man who had run from police several times. Within hours, they had the guy. Since then, Baxter says that all twelve Wanted Wednesdays posts have led to arrests, and three or four of those people have chosen to turn themselves in rather than wait for someone to claim the prize.
Not everyone is delighted by this. A local pastor has raised concerns that the approach risks dehumanizing the people being named, since “holding people accountable for alleged crimes is not a challenge or a game.” That is a fair point and worth taking seriously. There is also a journalism angle here. The Associated Press stopped naming suspects in minor crimes a few years back precisely because online posts have a way of outlasting any conviction or acquittal that follows.
I will say, though, that as a defence lawyer there is something almost charming about a suspect who, faced with the choice between being chased through a field by police dogs and walking into the station so that someone in their community can collect a milkshake, chooses the milkshake. If you have an outstanding warrant in Vermont, you now know what to do.
The Lesson of Volume 400
Four hundred Wednesdays in, the through-line is pretty consistent. People who are wanted by the police are almost always found. The variables are how, when, and how much additional trouble they create for themselves in the process. The Wisconsin driver added seven charges and a tasing to whatever he was originally going to face. The Alabama driver added a destroyed car, a wrong-way chase, and a Sheriff in his face. The Vermont woman added almost nothing to her file, except possibly the irritation that someone she knows is now eating burgers on her behalf.
The cheapest exit is usually the courtroom door. The most expensive exit involves an embankment. There is a lesson in there somewhere.
See you next week for Volume 401.
