I took this picture the first time I was sent out with my own photographer to pick up a Vo/Sot. I'm wanting to say this was taken on a Monday...the previous Saturday a man checks out of a KC Hospital and has no ride home...so...he decides to take one. After looking around he finds an empty MAST Ambulance sitting in a driveway with the keys in it...so he takes it. But, what he didn't know was that all emergency vehicles are equipped with an internal GPS so authorities were able to track his progress through the city. Police caught up with him and the man took off on a high speed chase down the highway. The chase ended in Independence where Police threw out stop sticks. When the man in the ambulance ran over them, he lost control and hit a very large tree. As you can see from the picture, it completely totaled the ambulance. After that...the man took his third ride in an ambulance in a period of less than 24 hours, just this time he was handcuffed to a gurney.
In this case the station was playing catch-up. Other stations in the area aired the piece when it happened, late Saturday night into Sunday morning. But because we were short staffed, we didn't have a Photog to go shoot it. The photographer I was working with that day, Pat Holloway, has more contacts with law enforcement than any reporter I dealt with this summer. She was able to get in touch with a supervisor at MAST who not only gave us an interview (that I got to conduct) but also let us into the back lot of the building to see the damaged ambulance.
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