Watch as Connecticut police apprehend a man in a stolen car after a chase and oncoming crash.

TO Peter Jankowski

Source Connecticut Post, Bridgeport

The call to Wilton starts out innocuous enough.

Driving his cruiser, a local police officer pulls into his driveway on Sturges Ridge Road. The footage from his body camera is silent at first, but a ticker in the upper left corner shows the date and time – shortly before 9:30 a.m. on October 3.

The officer gets out of the car, covering his head with a baseball cap, and the sound of the video turns on. His body language and tone are friendly as he approaches the driver’s window of a gray Mazda sedan.

“What happened to the license plate on this car?” he asks the young man behind the wheel, who is wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap.

“What’s happened?” the driver answers.

“The license plate is not returning to this car, that’s the problem,” the officer tells him. “It belongs to someone else, did you buy the car?”

“It’s mom’s,” the driver can be heard muttering in response.

The officer leans over to look at the back of the car, and the rear license plate is briefly visible in the frame.

“Okay, where does your mom live?” the officer begins to question him.

But the driver begins to turn the steering wheel, and the car creeps forward.

“Hey, get back here,” the officer says, and then yells, “Hey, get back here!”

But the car with the mysterious sign continues to move, and the officer runs after it. While turning left, the driver hits the police cruiser’s front bumper, then the rear fascia or bumper, the video shows. With a screech of tires, the car disappears and heads down Sturges Ridge Road.

The roughly 30-second encounter that morning in Wilton set off a chaotic chase through southwestern Connecticut in which the car crashed after entering the Merritt Parkway and traveling in the wrong direction. One of the passengers was quickly detained, but the driver, having fled the scene, remained at large.

Police from multiple agencies responded and conducted an extensive search using K-9s, checking barns and other places where the driver may have been hiding. He was eventually apprehended after police said he showed up in a car outside the police station trying to rescue his accomplice.

In a summary of the traffic stop in Wilton, police said an officer pulled over a gray 2012 Mazda 3 sedan on Sturges Ridge Road after the driver failed to stop at a stop sign. The summary said the vehicle did not have a front license plate and a check of the rear plate showed it was registered to a Nissan, not a Mazda.

“It was later determined that both the vehicle and license plate were stolen during an armed carjacking with a firearm earlier that day in Bridgeport,” Wilton police said in a news release.

After fleeing from a Wilton police officer, the driver “continued to drive south on Sturges Ridge Road at a high rate of speed,” the report said.

Fairfield police spotted the stolen Mazda heading north on Merritt Parkway shortly after 9:40 a.m., minutes after it fled the scene in Wilton, the department said in a news release.

Dash cam footage from a Fairfield police cruiser shows an officer pursuing a stolen car at high speeds along Merritt Parkway, at times quickly crossing lanes.

As they approached Exit 48, the Mazda veered out of the left lane at the last minute, driving across the white line, the footage shows. The pursuing cruiser followed as the stolen car turned right at a red light, making a U-turn on side streets, the footage shows. The Mazda returned to Merritt heading north due to traffic, occasionally pulling into the emergency lane to pass other cars, dashboard footage shows.

At Exit 51, the car got off the Merritt again, as seen in the footage, with the Fairfield cruiser still in pursuit. The driver drove straight through the red light, barely passing stopped traffic, and made a U-turn in the Department of Transportation parking lot, where the car barely dodged the cruiser, the footage shows.

The police incident report notes that police placed “tire deflation devices” at the exit of the DOT building, but the driver of the stolen vehicle evaded them.

The video shows the cruiser chasing the stolen Mazda to Exit 51. The report says the car started going down the ramp in the wrong direction and “attempted to turn around” and enter northbound Merritt. However, the vehicle collided with another vehicle, causing “severe damage to the front end” of the Mazda, disabling the stolen car, according to the report.

Police dash cam video captured the officer running across the highway in his police K-9 shortly before the video ended.

The report said the vehicle collided with a Chevrolet Suburban SUV carrying a family of five, including two children ages 2 and 4.

“Although the family was involved in a serious motor vehicle accident that placed all occupants in a potentially life-threatening situation, they suffered no visible injuries and refused ambulance transport,” the report states.

After the crash, the Mazda’s two occupants crossed the southbound lanes of Highway 15 and entered a wooded area “adjacent to the highway,” the report said.

Body camera footage of the pursuing officer shows him pulling his K-9 out of the back of his police pickup as he runs across the south side of Merritt as drivers pull over. They run into the forest and the video turns on sound.

As seen in the video, a police officer and a police dog cornered one of the suspects in the woods and ordered him to the ground. Another officer then approached and took the man into custody.

The man, Elijah Holloman, 21, told police he was a passenger in the Mazda and didn’t know where the driver had gone, according to the report. A witness to the crash on the Merritt, who was also involved in the collision, described the second male suspect as tall and thin, wearing dark clothing, the report said.

Police used a dog to track the location where Holloman was found and led them to a residential area off Partridge Lane in Trumbull, the report said. Police found a pair of Nike sandals in the bushes near Partridge Lane, but further attempts by the Fairfield K-9 Unit and the State Police K-9 Team were unsuccessful to track the remaining suspect, according to the report.

The hunt for the remaining suspect appears to have turned into a large-scale manhunt.

A Fairfield Police press release states, “Telecommunicators, officers and detectives from Fairfield, Trumbull, Bridgeport, Wilton, Westport, Connecticut State Police (CSP), the CSP Vehicle Theft Task Force, and area K-9 units established communications, perimeters, and investigation” to find the suspect still at large.

Body camera footage of Trumbull officers involved in the canvass shows officers wandering through the woods and at one point checking a barn as a potential hideout.

Police can also be heard noting that the suspect is barefoot and that he accidentally grabbed Holloman’s phone from the car as the couple fled.

The Fairfield police report said the officer also found a “large number” of counterfeit receipts on the center console of the stolen vehicle, most of which had Fairfield addresses on them. Police photographed the receipts and checked the vehicle identification number, which showed it was listed as stolen and should be held for fingerprints, the report said. Bridgeport police later seized the vehicle as evidence, according to the report.

Parts of the report obtained by CT Insider were redacted, but at some point, Holloman’s father showed up at the Trumbull Police Department looking for his son, the report said. He was ordered to report to Fairfield Police as the arresting agency.

According to the report, the man showed up at the Fairfield Police Department, where police stopped the vehicle. The incident report said Holloman’s father was driving, but one of the other two occupants of the car matched the description of another suspect in the stolen car chase.

The report notes that the passenger, identified as Dominke Adrian Reed, was not wearing shoes.

According to the report, the father explained to police that Reed called him via FaceTime on his son’s phone and told him he was in jail. The father told investigators he picked Reed up in Trumbull. He said Reed came out of the bushes near the house and got into his car, according to the report. The father told police that Reed told him he was in the stolen car with Holloman and that police had arrested his son, the report said.

Holloman’s father told investigators he didn’t know Reed but was “only worried about finding his son,” the report said.

Holloman faces charges of interfering with a police officer and theft of a motor vehicle. He is free on $25,000 bail.

Fairfield police charged Reed with careless driving, engaging police in a pursuit, driving the wrong way on a one-way street and interfering with an officer. He is also charged with theft of a motor vehicle and two counts of injury to a child.

Wilton police charged Reed with careless driving, failure to obey an officer’s signal, evading responsibility, improper use of markers, failure to display license plates and failure to obey a stop sign.

He remains in custody at the Bridgeport Correctional Center in lieu of $75,000 bail in the Fairfield case, records show.

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