SANDY SPRINGS, Ga. — Police are looking for a man who led officers on a chase in a stolen truck through several counties before crashing in Sandy Springs and running off.
Just before 3 a.m. Thursday, the Dodge Ram truck – which Georgia State Patrol says was stolen from an airport in Kentucky – slammed into a utility pole along Mount Vernon Highway near Northside Drive. It traveled a short distance before crashing in the yard of a vacant house.
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Sandy Springs police used K9s in an effort to track down the driver, but say there’s no evidence he’s in the immediate area. GSP says investigators are working to determine the identity of the driver. Officers recovered a wallet from the debris at the crash scene, which could identify the driver.
Eric Schonberg lives along Mount Vernon Highway.
“I heard sirens in the distance and all of a sudden a car flying up the road, and then I heard three cop cars following pretty closely,” he said. “And all of a sudden, I heard an explosion, kind of a pow, and then everything stopped.”
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The Georgia State Patrol says the driver got away from a trooper in Whitfield County, near the Tennessee state line, and headed south on Interstate 75. Investigators say Cobb County police lost contact with the truck as it sped east on I-285 into Sandy Springs.
Police in Sandy Springs say they found the pickup truck behind a business, but the driver took off. He led police and troopers on a chase along Mount Vernon Highway, where the truck ran into a power pole and crashed in a yard.
The impact knocked out power to about two dozen homes for hours on a cold Thursday. “We lost heat for a couple of hours, but it wasn’t bad,” said Ted Green, who lives near the scene. With the suspect on the loose, he expressed concern for the neighborhood’s safety. “It’s a little disconcerting. Once we heard that, then we locked our doors and got the dog out,” Green said.
“Local authorities in Kentucky are in the process of completing the stolen vehicle report,” said a statement from the Georgia State Patrol.
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