A 22-year-old stole a car, got stopped, stole a police car from the officers trying to get him, then led half the cops in Bergen County, NJ on an almost unbelievable chase. Here are the intense final minutes of pursuit from the car that finally brought him down.
I understand tunnel vision and adrenaline must have been running pretty high here, but does some of this police driving look a little spastic to anyone else? The camera car seems to be taking “aggressive” to a whole new level... the driver’s determination to be the one arresting the perp is pretty obvious by the second time he passes the entire fleet of other pursuing cruisers.
NY Daily News says suspect Sereymanta Kong started his rampage by stealing a Mercedes in Englewood Cliffs from a woman who stopped to help him as he “he lay in the road” feigning injury.
Once she figured out she was getting carjacked she (smartly) prioritized getting her kids out of the vehicle. Englewood Cliffs Police Chief Michael Cioffi told the paper “The daughter got out right away. The son was on his cell phone. He wasn’t paying attention.”
At least we can laugh about that now because the other kid did get out before Kong sped off.
Police apparently caught up with him and almost shut him down in the town of Alpine, but Kong and rammed the two police cars that’d cornered him and was able to steal Officer Marc Krapels’ Crown Vic cruiser.
By that point more police vehicles started converging on Kong as he took off through towns and red lights for about twenty minutes, finally being rammed by Officer Erik Goodell whose pretty wild dash-cam footage you saw above.
The chase really escalates around the 04:30 mark when Goodell parts traffic going the wrong way on a divided road, and Kong straight-up starts a Blues Brothers-style chain reaction of cop car crashes when he spins a pursuit Taurus at around 06:00.
Police brought the stolen cop car to a halt in front of a Jeep dealership and ended the apprehended Kong after a brief foot pursuit.
North Jersey’s The Record says Kong continued fighting through his capture and trip to the hospital where he apparently tried to attack a nurse. His charges were summarized as; “first-degree carjacking [and] a total of 17 counts on various offenses, including assaulting police in four jurisdictions on Tuesday as Paramus, New Milford and the Bergen County Sheriff’s Office filed additional charges. He was being held at the Bergen County Jail on $1.275 million bail.”
In total, four police officers but no bystanders were apparently injured. Stay safe out there, people.
GIF by Raphael Orlove
Contact the author at andrew@jalopnik.com.