A California man has been arrested after driving from a Monterey yard in an attempt to elude police during a high-speed drunken chase.
Martin Urroz, 21, of Fresno, was booked into the Monterey County Jail on multiple charges, including driving under the influence of alcohol and eluding a police officer.
Officers with the Monterey Police Department were walking along Alvarado Street Sunday when they saw a green 1997 Chevrolet Silverado pickup roaring around the corner, heading the wrong way on a one-way street.
As the truck pulled into Municipal Wharf II, a busy pier lined with restaurants, another MPD officer turned on the overhead lights of his police cruiser to initiate a traffic stop.
The driver, later identified as Urroz, drove to the right of the dock and stopped. When the officer approached the vehicle on foot, the truck resumed its journey and drove “at a high rate of speed” toward the end of the dock, police said.
A California man has been arrested after he drove his pickup truck over a dock in Monterey and plunged into the ocean in a desperate attempt to evade police
Martin Urroz, 21, of Fresno, was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol after driving the wrong way down a one-way street, driving onto the pier and plunging into the ocean
Police said the three other people in the car suffered minor injuries, while Urroz was taken to a local trauma center for treatment.
Officers spotted the four occupants of the vehicle in the ocean and suspected they had jumped in to avoid police before realizing the Chevrolet Silverado was submerged
The officer called other officers for help and got back into his patrol car. He drove to the end of the dock, where he suspected the truck was hiding behind a building.
Other officers arrived and parked their patrol cars to block the truck’s exit. As they started walking to the end of the dock, they heard calls for help coming from the ocean below.
Assuming the four people had jumped in to avoid capture, police threw flotation devices into the water and instructed them to hold on while they called the fire department.
But when the pickup was nowhere to be seen, police realized the truck had driven off the dock and disappeared underwater.
All four people were rescued from the water in a joint effort between MPD, the Monterey Fire Department and the United States Coast Guard.
Urroz was taken to the Natividad Trauma Center for treatment, while the three passengers suffered only minor injuries, police said.
The scene was eerily reminiscent of an incident two months ago, when a car plunged off a 650-foot-long pier in Virginia Beach in the early hours of Jan. 27.
The scene mirrored an incident from earlier this year, when a 57-year-old man drove off the end of a pier in Virginia Beach, apparently killing himself.
The driver roared down the 200-metre-long boardwalk and appeared to brake briefly before crashing through a wooden railing into the ocean.
The vehicle left a scene of destruction and appeared to almost collide with a pedestrian
The medical examiner identified the driver as a Virginia Beach resident but declined to release his name
The driver appeared to brake before plowing through a wooden railing at the end of the boardwalk, leaving a tangle of mangled barriers.
The moment the car fell over the edge was captured by a witness filming from a nearby beach.
Footage from another angle showed the vehicle almost colliding with a passenger.
Police released underwater video of the wreck during their investigation, showing the car rolling onto its roof on the seabed.
The vehicle was recovered from the water days later, but the medical examiner declined to release the driver’s name, noting only that he was a 57-year-old resident of the area.
Virginia Beach police indicated the man likely died by suicide.
“While we cannot assume we fully know what motivated this individual’s actions, they appear to have been intentional,” the department wrote in a news release.