Block full of cops.

Today I returned, at 4:30pm, from running an errand to discover police cars zooming through my neighborhood, sirens blaring. I figured there had been an accident on the main road (there was, more on this in a minute), but as I turned onto my (dead-end) block, I only got halfway to my house before three cop cars were piled up at the intersection behind me. Cops jumped out to stop, question, handcuff, and plunk in the back of one of the (now four) Hyattsville PD cruisers, a kid who had been just minutes before walking down the other side of the street talking on his cell phone.

By the time I got to my house (in the middle of the block), four more cruisers had zoomed down to the cul de sac (P.G. County, Maryland / National Capitol Park Police, Riverdale Park, and our own University Park unit), and had two more people sitting on the sidewalk. They were shortly joined by four more Riverdale Park cars (2 of them canine units, leading me to believe they were looking for dealers in the park at the end of our block) and our town police chief (arriving in a plain white sedan). At this point, the 11 cop cars from 5 jurisdictions (something I got used to seeing in DC, but didn’t expect to find out here in the ‘burbs) were completely filling the street, sandwiched in around the handful of resident cars parked on the block.

The cops didn’t seem to be doing much more than milling around; no guns were out, no megaphones were squawking, no hordes of people were being frog-marched from the park. So, I made myself dinner, and when I looked outside again around 5:05pm, there had appeared in front of my house an ambulance (thank you, Hyattsville volunteer FD), a tow-truck pulling a smashed car, and an also-smashed black pickup truck. Bearing in mind that I live on a dead-end street, I was at this point dying to know what the heck was going on, and also convinced that no one would believe me unless I documented the scene (which I did, although only on film, as my digital camera is still broken; otherwise, I’d be sharing the photos now). Once outside, I finally got the story from a guy walking back up the block, who was not a cop, and who seemed only too happy to tell me what was going on.

What was going on: a car had been jacked (I’m guessing in the park over in Riverdale, since the park police were the jurisdiction farthest from us), driven away with the owner still inside (through Riverdale Park and Hyattsville, no doubt ‘at high speed’), and had slammed into another car (at the major intersection on the corner of our town, 2 blocks away from my house), driving that car up onto the side of the road (most likely the smashee being the car on the tow truck, and the smasher being the black pickup).

The carjackers then made the strategic error of turning into our town in an attempt to get away. Any taxi driver who’s dropped off in here, or any college student trying to get back to campus from Target, could have told them this was a doomed choice. Finding themselves in a morass of dead-end blocks, they ditched the car a couple of blocks down from ours (leaving the owner with it), and ‘fled on foot’ through the park, ending up at the end of our block where they were stopped and held until the owners of the two cars could come over and identify them. The guy who told me all this was the husband of the woman in the smashed car, who lives on the block behind us (more data to support the assertion that most accidents happen within a mile of home, as she was only 2 blocks from her house when she was run off the road). By 5:20pm, all the cop cars had driven off (one by one, carefully extricating themselves from the wedge formation they had created on the block).

My timing couldn’t have been better on this, in terms of getting to see most of the action but not getting hit by either carjackers or police officers zooming around my block like maniacs. When I passed the intersection, I figured there had been an accident as I saw a car at the side of the road (the smashee, as it turns out) and a cop car with lights flashing. Not 10 minutes later, there was the full pile-up on our street.

I can’t wait to read the write-up for this in next month’s town newsletter.