Police beat: An air horn, a hit and run, and a woman with two names

Editor’s note: Compiled from reports to Tacoma police and the Pierce County sheriff’s office.

Oct. 19: The man slept on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store, oblivious to voices and police flashlights. A blast from an air horn jolted him awake.

The two officers were answering a trespassing call. A security guard patrolling the property in the 3800 block of Pacific Avenue wanted the man gone. The guard said the man refused to leave after being told to move along.

Startled by the air horn blast, the man, 31, refused when officers underlined the request. He said he wanted to go to jail and wanted to fight. He said the officers were the ones who needed to leave.

“I kill people,” the man said.

Court records reveal the man’s long history of mental illness dating to 2002, and a diagnosis of schizophrenia tied to an arrest in 2015 that led to a stint in Western State Hospital — not his first. The records say the man was supposed to receive inpatient care and had been waiting for a spot in mid-March. Seven months later, he was sleeping on a sidewalk.

Officers ran a records check on the man and found an arrest warrant tied to the earlier case. They booked him into the Pierce County Jail on suspicion of criminal trespassing.

Oct. 19: The woman knew the ignition interlock device in her car would stop her from drinking and driving — so she drove her daughter’s car instead.

Officers found her at the corner of Norpoint Way Northeast and 29th Street Northeast in Tacoma, tracked by another driver with a crunched bumper. The driver had followed the woman after she banged into his car.

The woman, 52, sat in the driver’s seat. She told the officers she had no license handy and no insurance. She said she hadn’t hit anyone with the car. She wore pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. She tried to light a cigarette as she spoke. She missed the end and burned the middle.

Officers caught a strong whiff of stale beer. The woman said she had a couple in the parking lot of a nearby smoke shop. Unopened beer cans were in the passenger seat.

She said she was driving her daughter’s car because she knew her own wouldn’t start with the interlock device, which had been installed after a DUI conviction in 2015.

She refused to take field sobriety tests. She swayed as she walked. Officers booked her into the Pierce County Jail on suspicion of drunken driving, hit and run, and violating a prior warning against driving without an interlock device.

Oct. 18: For whatever reason, the area in the 8800 block of South Hosmer Street draws more than its share of drug activity and stolen cars.

The sheriff’s deputy knew it and kept the point in mind as he approached a car seemingly stranded in a parking lot. The driver’s window and the back window were smashed out.

Two people sat inside: a man, 47, and a woman, 38. The steering wheel and the stereo were damaged.

The man handed the deputy a state identification card and said he might have a warrant from the state Department of Corrections. He said he missed an appointment with his community corrections officer two weeks earlier.

The car was his, the man said — he just bought it, and someone had tried to steal the stereo.

The woman, seated in back, wore a pair of big sunglasses and said nothing. The deputy asked for her identification. She pulled out a purple and pink phone pouch, started to remove a driver’s license, pushed it back in, opened the pouch, closed it, pulled out the license and handed it over.

The first name on the license was “Sarah.”

The officer took a skeptical look and asked whether the woman had any other identification with this name on it. The woman pulled out a Social Security card with the same name.

The deputy ran a records check and found a warrant listed for the man. He cuffed him and took him toward a patrol car.

The man asked the deputy to give the woman his wallet and phone. The deputy agreed and handed it over.

At the same moment, the man called to the woman, saying, “Hey Jessica, will you bring the car to my mom’s house?”

The deputy stopped. What was the woman’s name again?

“Uh,” the man said. “Sarah. I don’t know her very well and just met her.”

The deputy talked to the woman and asked whether she wanted to be honest. She admitted giving a false name. She said she had an arrest warrant too and didn’t want to go to jail.

The deputy cuffed her, took her toward the patrol car and told her to sit on the bumper. He went back to the man, seated him in the patrol car, turned back and saw the woman running away.

The deputy yelled at her to stop. She didn’t. She reached a black truck that was leaving the parking lot and tried to open the door — a tough task while handcuffed. The deputy caught up, took the woman back to the patrol car and seated her next to the man. The woman said she ran because she was scared and didn’t want to go to jail for identity theft.

The deputy searched the woman’s purses; she had two of them. They contained multiple identification cards belonging to others, stolen mail and notebooks with bank account numbers listed.

A records check on the woman revealed a warrant tied to a prior arrest for identity theft. The man and the woman were both booked into the Pierce County Jail.

This story was originally published October 21, 2016 at 4:19 PM with the headline "Police beat: An air horn, a hit and run, and a woman with two names."