An officer following a vehicle on Saturday led to the arrest of a woman on outstanding warrants from Hamilton County and additional charges from East Ridge after she ran from police and crashed her car.
According to a police report, an officer was following a gold Saturn westbound down Ringgold Road just before 7:30 a.m.. When the car turned south onto South Seminole it began to accelerate, the report states. When the officer continued down South Seminole he saw that the car had crashed into a telephone pole at S. Seminole and Bennett Road.
The report states that the officer activated his emergency lights and saw “multiple parties” take off from the car on foot. The officer saw three men run behind Freedom Church toward Reeves Avenue and drove around the block to try and find them. He also saw a woman running toward a nearby house. The report states that the officer temporarily detained two men on Reeves Avenue. One of the men told the officer that the woman driving the car was named “Krystal.”
The man told the officer that “Krystal” had accelerated in the car when she noticed the police car behind her because she said she did not want to go back to jail.
The resident at the house near the crash scene told officers that his son heard a woman yelling for help and the son went outside to investigate. The son went to a detached garage and noticed that the door was locked. The resident told officers that the door is never locked.
A police officer went to the garage and ordered the woman to come out. The report states that she complied. The woman, identified as Krystal Ward, 33, of a Rossville address, had an active warrant out of Hamilton County for Failure to Appear.
Ward was written traffic citations, including one for Leaving the Scene of an Accident, before she was taken to Erlanger Hospital due to injuries received in the crash.
The report states that arrest warrants will be issued for Ward on charges of Burglary and Evading Arrest.
_ An alert police officer on his way back from the Hamilton County Jail on Saturday may have recovered stolen property related to burglaries in East Ridge.
According to a police report, Officer Darwin Scott spotted a Chevy Blazer in the 3700 block of Rossville Boulevard that was a suspect vehicle in several lawn equipment thefts in East Ridge. Officer Scott pulled the vehicle over and spoke with the two occupants, who identified themselves as Artterius Lemont Bonds and Johnathan Simmons. Bonds told the officer that the vehicle belonged to him.
The report states that Officer Scott told the men that the Blazer matched a vehicle linked to several thefts in East Ridge and asked for identification. Bonds produced a “very used Tennessee paper ID,” the report states. The other man, Simmons, said he didn’t have identification but provided officers with a date of birth and social security number.
When Bonds’s information was run through dispatch, it was revealed that his license had been revoked. The information for Simmons came back as not on file.
A Chattanooga officer who had been called to the scene was researching Simmons’s information and found a photo matching the man. However, the photo was that of 25-year-old Kadarius Jamal Marshall of a Jeffrey Lane address in Chattanooga. Marshall had two verified Juvenile Attachments through the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office for Contempt of Court for non-payment. The report states Marshall was taken into custody.
Police asked for and received permission to search the vehicle. The report states that police found a Husqvarna backpack leaf blower. “Due to the prior knowledge of the vehicle being involved in thefts, the item was removed and placed into property and inventory as suspected stolen,” the report states.
The report lists three addresses, Clayton Avenue, John Ross Road and Sunnydell Lane, in which the Blazer may have been the vehicle used by suspected thieves.
