This Is Why You Wear Your Seatbelt, Kids

Footage of a chase involving Oklahoma Highway Patrol and a Ford Ranger that was reported stolen was recently released and it’s pretty dramatic. At the end of the pursuit, the trooper PITs the little truck, which in turn flips multiple times, flinging the passengers who weren’t wearing seatbelts through the open windows. It’s a prime example of not only why you should wear seatbelts but also not run from the cops.

Watch a pitted car flip and catch fire.

What triggered the attempted traffic stop was the failure to use a turn signal and the third brake light being out. Those admittedly are small issues, but the driver ran anyway, or at least tried to. And when dispatch ran the plates the truck came up as stolen, so it seems many bad decisions were made that fateful night.

The suspect pulls out all the stops he can for driving such a small, slow truck. Countless times he acts like he’s exiting the freeway only to cut across the gore point. One would think after that didn’t work at all a time or two, maybe three, the driver would realize he’s not exactly behind the wheel of a road-carving Porsche. Instead, he just keeps doing what doesn’t fake out the trooper at all.

He also drives on the shoulder repeatedly, a trick that also doesn’t fake out the trooper and gains the Ranger nothing. But the guy keeps doing that because if it doesn’t work, you need to keep repeating until it magically does.

At one point the driver throws some container of liquid out the window, spraying the trooper’s windshield slightly as the container explodes on the road surface. Who knows what the point of that was.

One of the dumbest moves is toward the end of the pursuit when the suspect starts brake checking the trooper. The guy doesn’t seem to realize Rangers don’t do super great in crashes, plus the trooper has a push bar mounted on his front bumper, guaranteeing who would win if they did make contact.

Sadly, both passengers in the truck died, one at the scene and the other 17 days later. While some media outlets tried to cast the trooper as being reckless, citing anonymous “policing researchers” about pursuit policies, the fact is nobody made the driver keep trying to ditch the trooper.

What do you think? Was the trooper out of line?