He Was Driving in the Wrong Lane—Then He Turned the Road Into a Weapon

The first time I heard the words “he’s trying to ram me,” I still thought we were dealing with a dangerous driver. I had no idea how much worse the next few minutes were going to become. I was heading south on 63, closing in on I-25, when I started calling out our position and asking whether someone could get spikes set up ahead. The vehicle was all over the roadway, drifting into the opposite lane and forcing other drivers to react. Then he turned around. For a moment, I thought he might be trying to escape back toward where he came from. Instead, he accelerated toward me. He struck my vehicle intentionally, pulled alongside the road, then came back again. I remember hearing myself report it over the radio almost mechanically, because there are moments when your training takes over before your brain has time to catch up. “He just rammed me.” Those words sounded different the second time I said them. This wasn't somebody losing control of a car anymore. Someone was deliberately using a vehicle to hurt people.

I kept updating dispatch as we moved north on 63. He was driving in the opposite lane of travel, and that was the part that scared me most. A reckless driver can make a mistake. A person who crosses into oncoming traffic can cause a tragedy without ever intending to. But this driver wasn't simply drifting. He was continuing despite everything around him, and other people were now becoming obstacles in his path. I asked whether there were units close enough to help me contain him. I was thinking about the other drivers, the people who had no idea what was happening and could suddenly find a vehicle coming directly at them. We approached the area near the mile marker, and I began considering a PIT maneuver because letting him continue in the wrong lane was putting innocent people at risk. Then we heard he had a tire iron. That detail changed the calculation again. Suddenly there wasn't just a dangerous vehicle. There was a person reportedly armed with an object capable of causing serious injury.

The driver kept going toward Pecos. Then I saw something that made my stomach drop—a bicyclist. I warned over the radio that he had attempted to hit a person on a bike. There were more cyclists in the area. I remember thinking that none of those people had chosen to be part of this. They were simply riding their bikes, going about their day, and now a pursuit was moving directly through their path. I called for everyone to get off the road. The driver continued. At one point, I said I was going to hit him head-on because he was still coming, still putting people in danger, still refusing to stop. The language on the radio became frantic because there was no longer enough time to calmly describe what was happening. He struck my vehicle intentionally again. Then suddenly he was on foot.

That transition from vehicle to person happened so fast that it almost didn't feel real. One second I was dealing with a moving car. The next, the driver was outside and running toward me. I gave him commands to stop. He kept coming. Officers moved in, and the struggle began. He fought. He tried to bite. He resisted being taken into custody. I heard him demanding to be let go while officers repeatedly told him to stop fighting. Someone checked him for weapons. In the middle of all that chaos, he said something that made everyone pause for a second: “I'm pregnant.” I couldn't tell whether he was speaking about himself, someone else, or whether the words were simply part of the confusion of the moment. The encounter was too chaotic to make sense of every sentence. All we could do was get control of his hands, secure him, and make sure nobody else got hurt.

Once he was finally restrained, the adrenaline didn't disappear immediately. That is something people don't always understand about moments like this. Your body can remain in the emergency long after the immediate threat has stopped. Officers were checking each other, checking the scene, trying to understand what had happened. Someone was confirming that the driver had gone head-on. Another officer reported seeing the bicycle and said the vehicle had struck the bike. The radio traffic sounded fragmented because everyone was still reconstructing the same few minutes from different positions. One person saw the car. Another saw the cyclist. Another was dealing with the suspect on foot. I was still trying to process the fact that a vehicle had intentionally rammed mine while people were riding bicycles nearby.

And then came the part that always feels different—the part where you start counting what could have happened. The radio traffic indicated that the suspect had intentionally driven toward people and had struck a bicycle. The transcript does not establish that anyone was killed or provide a complete account of the injuries or final court outcome, so I wouldn't pretend to know more than those moments show. But I knew what I had seen. I knew how close the vehicle had come to other people. I knew what it felt like when he crossed into the opposite lane. I knew what it sounded like when I told dispatch he had just rammed me. And I knew that the people riding those bicycles had been only a few seconds away from becoming the center of a completely different story.

What stayed with me wasn't the arrest itself. It was the road. Roads are supposed to connect people. You drive down one and expect everyone around you to follow the same basic rules: stay in your lane, watch for other vehicles, stop when you're told to stop. That day, the road became something else. Every lane change carried a threat. Every approaching vehicle could have been the next collision. Every cyclist became someone we had to protect. And when the suspect finally left the vehicle, the danger didn't disappear—it simply changed shape.

I've been in enough dangerous situations to know that people often remember the loudest moment. They remember the crash, the shouting, the handcuffs, the flashing lights. But I remember the quieter moment before all of that—the moment when I was still asking for spikes and hoping we could stop the vehicle without anybody getting hurt. There is a version of this story where everything ends with a simple traffic stop. There is another version where someone doesn't react quickly enough, a cyclist doesn't get out of the way, or another driver happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong second.

That is why I still think about those few miles on 63. The pursuit itself was frightening, but what frightened me more was how many innocent people were already on that road. They weren't suspects. They weren't officers. They weren't part of the chase. They were simply there. And sometimes that is the most important thing to remember about a dangerous incident: the people at greatest risk are often the people who never knew they were involved until the danger was already coming straight at them.