Photo by ep_jhu.

Photo by ep_jhu.

While some heinous local crime stories come and go without national attention, other more wacky ones go viral. That’s the case of the 31-year-old Northeast D.C. man who stole an ambulance Saturday morning while being transferred from another vehicle.

The Washington Post has the story:

While the patient was being transferred to a second ambulance, first responders noticed one of the units was moving and spotted a non-authorized individual in the driver’s seat, said Tim Wilson, DC Fire & EMS department spokesman.
…
Araz Alali, a police spokesman, said officers followed the ambulance about seven blocks until they arrested the driver at the intersection of Mount Olivet Road and Brentwood Parkway in Northeast. The suspect was taken into custody and is facing auto theft charges, Alali said.

The story received international attention from Internet trashcan, the Daily Mail. This crime follows a May arrest of a naked man high on PCP who allegedly shot a childhood friend then climbed on a firetruck in Prince George’s County. (That story was also aggregated by the Mail.)

While it may be tempting to make jokes about PCP crimes with a wackiness element, this is just a friendly reminder that PCP is a major — and serious issue — in D.C.

A recent Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring Program report from the Office of National Drug Control Policy showed that 12 percent of men arrested in D.C. last year had PCP in their systems. As a prescient 2011 City Paper story reported, use of PCP in D.C. was low in 2010, but was quickly rising.

Here are some other PCP-related crime from recent years:

  • In February, a man on PCP was arrested for allegedly killing one man and trying to kill an off-duty police officer in Lanham, Md.
  • In 2011, a District man was sentenced to 20-years in prison for killing a woman and injuring her four children by driving the wrong-way on a Southeast road while high on PCP.
  • Via a 2009 Post story:

    Damon D. Taylor had been smoking PCP before he walked into his mother’s bedroom this month and shot her several times in the chest as she lay in bed, police say; Charlese J. Hall tested positive for PCP when she was arrested in the stabbing death of her 7-year-old daughter in December; Derek J. Green also had been using PCP in July before he drove his car onto a sidewalk along Alabama Avenue SE at more than 60 miles an hour, pinning a pedestrian against another car.

    • Filed Under: crime, metropolitan police department, pcp,