A police chase that started just after 11 p.m. Wednesday night ended 40 minutes later on Capp and 24th streets when a taxi crashed into the fleeing vehicle, injuring two and spinning off to involve three parked cars on Capp between 24th and 25th streets.
The driver fled on foot, but was quickly arrested, according to Officer Mike Ferguson from the California Highway Patrol.
The suspect is being held in jail pending charges for a felony of evading police, possession of a controlled substance and a suspected DUI.
The passenger in the suspect’s car is being treated for non-life-threatening injuries at San Francisco General Hospital. There are no plans to arrest him, according to Ferguson. The taxi driver was injured, but was treated and released at the scene.
Officer Ferguson said the chase began in Alameda when officers tried to pull the driver over for a traffic violation. Instead, the driver took off, driving through the East Bay on Highway 580 in speeds that exceeded 100 miles per hour.
The driver must have watched in his rearview mirror as a succession of CHP officers took over the pursuit – first officers from Castro Valley, then Oakland and finally in San Francisco when the driver went over the Bay Bridge and exited at 5th and Harrison streets.
Ferguson said the suspect traveled south on Harrison, turned on 24th and kept going until the car collided with a taxi cab on Capp Street. It then rammed into two parked cars and one of those cars slammed into a third parked car. The crash was violent enough to push two of the cars onto the sidewalk.
Eugeniya Kirovskaya, who lives on Capp Street and alerted us to the accident this morning, said that she first “heard a loud car speeding down Capp Street.”
After that she heard three distinct crashes and ran to the front of the house with her roommates.
“My roommate saw the driver running toward 25th and then the cops tackled him,” she said.
Some of those on Capp Street only discovered the accident this morning.
“I was baffled by how the damage happened,” said Andy Scarpelli, who walked out with his friend, Sangsook K. Pak, who is visiting from Sacramento to see the front of her car badly damaged.
Pak said that she would now be in San Francisco for awhile because police said it would take eight days to give her the report that can be used for insurance.
She arrived on Tuesday and got a ticket. “That was the first piece of bad luck,” she said.
When she saw that another car in front of her own had been totaled, she decided that she should consider last night’s accident as good luck.
Another resident who lives between 23rd and 24th Street said he was already in bed when he heard a big crash and then the sirens that followed. “I didn’t go out,” he said, adding that there had recently been a stabbing and he did not want to be involved.
Eugeniya Kirovskaya contributed to this report.