McDonald's Chicken Nugget Craving Ends A Wild Police Chase
Hold on Hamburglar! One Worcester, Massachusetts woman has taken McDonald's cravings to an entirely new level, ending a two-hour police chase involving a truck she stole as she got in line at one of the chain's drive-thrus (via Boston.com). The woman in question has since been identified as 38-year-old Johanna Gardell, who clearly really, really needed her McNugget fix. Gardell is hardly alone in her love for the good dippin' chicken snack, consumed at a rate of nearly 2.3 billion orders every year (via CNBC). This need for nuggets, however, was extreme.
Witness Raymond James Simoncini describes how it all began. Simoncini is the owner of Raymond James Restoration Inc., and early in the morning of July 6, he said his crew was unloading materials when they saw one of their trucks pulling away and noticed it wasn't being driven by an employee. Security tapes would later show Gardell in the driver's seat, after she had tested out a few other autos first. At 8:45 am, police were dispatched and proceeded to follow Gardell the next few hours, knowing her movements since the stolen vehicle had a GPS tracking system — but probably never figured they catch her at the fast food joint.
It's probably best not to get a snack in the middle of a car chase
Police pursued Gardell for more than two hours, at both high and low speeds. Twice they had to disengage the chase as the suspect drove the wrong way, ran red lights, hit nearby cars, and did more that put the public at risk. The issue became figuring out how to extract the driver from the stolen truck. In a release shared with the NY Post, one attempt was described in detail: "She backed up the vehicle at a high rate of speed and struck a cruiser behind her, and knocked down and dragged one of the detail officers."
Gardell continued on her joyride as police backed off. But officers finally managed to catch up to Gardell as she decided to take a break from police evasion to order some of those tasty chicky nuggies, a curious movement that was seen on the vehicle's GPS. Said truck owner Simoncini in his account of the ordeal shared with Boston.com, "She was actually in the drive-thru ordering food, and that's when they got her. ... She was ordering chicken nuggets and they actually held her up. The officers called ahead to hold her and slow down the line." The final roadblock? "She ended up in a flower bed," he said.
Gardell now faces 15 charges, which include resisting arrest as well as leaving the scene of an accident with property damage and the obvious theft of a vehicle, and is being held without bail awaiting a court date (via Yahoo!). Those chicken nuggets are likely to be a very expensive snack for her.