When you find yourself in emergency situations, what do you do? Some people step up to the plate and allow their skills to take over but other people just panic and that can put them in danger.
When a teenager found himself in a rather difficult situation, it was a panic event for sure. It happened in Minnesota, and the young teenage driver would have certainly been seriously injured if not killed if it weren’t for the quick thinking of the local police department.
It all started on September 17 when Samuel Dutcher, an 18-year-old driver was heading from North Dakota to Minnesota. Along the way, his vehicle started to have problems and it continued to accelerate without stopping.
The teenager was desperate for assistance and the only thing he could think to do was to call 911. Police were quick to jump in and do what was necessary, including coming up with an unfit conventional solution that saved his life.
In speaking with the news, he told them that his Honda Pilot started going faster and faster for no reason. He couldn’t slow the car down so he called his mother and 911 for assistance.
As the police were speeding to the scene, they were doing what they could to try to find him. As you can imagine, he was a moving target and once they realized that he couldn’t control this SUV and the brakes weren’t working, they knew they had problems.
They thought about using stop sticks to pop the tires but they realize that would be a bad situation. It was possible that he could’ve lost control of the vehicle and crashed terribly.
His mother, Catherine Dutcher was also panicking on the inside, saying: “Early, honestly, I was like, ‘My kid is probably dead.’ I was like, ‘God, please don’t kill my kid, please don’t.”
The police reassured her that they would do everything they possibly could to save him.
The car was running at top speed through one small town after another, not able to stop at stop signs or stop lights. At one point, it flew past the patrol car going 113 miles an hour! The deputies knew they had to act right away.
One of the state troopers said: “It was Deputy Johnson who said, ‘This road ends in a T in 3 to 4 miles, so at that point, we knew we had to get this car stopped.”
The footage shows the car driving out-of-control through a small town without another vehicle around. That’s when the police told him that he would have to crash his vehicle into the squad car.
The police officer said: “I was going 130 mph. The [squad] car tops out at 140.”
He pulled up alongside Dutcher and told him to crash his car into him. It was his only chance of survival. He ordered the teenager: “Yes, run into the back of his [the trooper’s] car.”
After hitting the police car, the nightmare was over. They were able to finally relax and at that point, the seriousness of the situation came flooding in on him.
Meanwhile, the policeman took a rather humble stand, saying: “I don’t think I did anything special. I think it came down to that I had the fastest car and I was able to get in front of him. There were a lot of factors in there where things could have gone very wrong very fast.”