A car thief led cops on a four hour, 100 mile car chase through a large swath of Southern California after he hopped into a taxi cab left with the keys inside outside a 7-Eleven late Thursday.
Authorities say Hugo Francisco Gonzalez, 25, was enticed by the empty cab sitting at the Santa Ana store sometime around 11 p.m. He hopped in at 1st and Flower Streets, leading dozens of law enforcement officers on a sometimes high, often slow, speed chase.
Gonzalez zipped up the Golden State Freeway through Anaheim and skirted through East Los Angeles, at one point blazing through an active construction scene at a high speed, KCBS-TV reported.
The chase kept on to State Route 14, the Antelope Valley Freeway, where members of the local California Highway Patrol division picked up the pursuit at speeds of anywhere from 10 to 40 miles per hours, a spokesman said.
At least one spike strip was used but did not disable the vehicle as Gonzalez continued to drive on with shredded rubber for tires and dented wheels that sparked as the kept moving.
One officer tried a PIT maneuver, which entails clipping a rear panel of the vehicle to force it off the road, to no avail.
By the time Gonzalez entered SR 14 southbound, the badly damaged car came to a stop just south of Avenue D, cops said, more than 100 miles from where he boosted the cab. He was busted at gunpoint around 3:30 a.m., charged with felony evading and held on $75,000 bail.
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