Highway Patrol: Grand Forks crash was ‘deliberate act’
Two
Zimmel said Tuesday that many details are still unclear from the initial call for service. He said Poitra may have been one of the 911 callers that brought police to the
"A lot of that is still to be determined through the investigation," he said. "The bottom line is there was a call for officers to speak to a male subject and it was unclear what the nature of the problem was."
Zimmel told the Herald Tuesday that Officers
Poitra then ran to a nearby patrol car--Zimmel said Tuesday afternoon that he doesn't know which officer's vehicle--and, at 5:22, fled the scene 12 minutes after the officers arrived.
During the scuffle, the officers suffered minor injuries. They were treated and released from
Also during the scuffle, the body camera of one of the officers was dislodged. As of late Tuesday afternoon, it had not been found. Police are asking the public for help as they search for it.
After stealing the patrol car, Poitra sped westbound on
Investigators are still determining how fast Poitra was driving, but Zimmel said "it was pretty substantially high speeds--he ripped through town."
Poitra was facing felony charges of burglary, theft and unlawful entry into vehicle in
An incident report said Poitra told officers on
Poitra cooked and ate a pizza in the break room, the report said. Security footage showed him going into five vehicles.
His permanent address is unclear, but a press release said Poitra had ties to
Video showing the aftermath of the collision was posted by
"Then he tore out of the ditch like a bat out of hell. He just floored it. There was rocks and grass and debris all over the place," he told the Herald Monday evening.
In the video, the semitrailer can be seen sliding into the median sideways amid a cloud of smoke and debris. The patrol car was completely destroyed.
Lt.
A replacement 2020 model runs for
Zimmel said the Highway Patrol is not investigating the scene as a crash, but rather as a deliberate act because "indications are that once he got on the interstate he steered directly into the semi."
Dahl told the Herald that Poitra "made a bee-line straight toward it."
An emergency alert was sent out around
Zimmel said he decided to issue the emergency alert because traffic was significantly stalled and there were numerous first responders on foot. The interstate was reduced to one lane of traffic in both directions.
The Herald asked if the responding officers broke department protocol during the incident.
The investigation is ongoing and Zimmel said he can't comment directly on procedures in place for this incident, but the procedures for how officers depart from their vehicles are generally situational.
"We're not going to have vehicles left unattended," he said. "An officer is not going to go up and do a loud party complaint with the keys in the vehicle and the vehicle running and the doors unlocked--that's not going to happen. At the same time, if an officer does a traffic stop on a vehicle and they're going to go talk to the violator, they're not going to turn the car off, take the keys out, put them in their pocket and go up and talk to that violator, so it really is situationally dependant."
The Herald's
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