Police caught two 16-year-old boys who led police on a high-speed chase that finished with a crash and a car fire on a busy section of Highway 50 in Sacramento on Tuesday afternoon, according to the sheriff’s office.
A spokesman for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, Sgt. Amar Gandhi said that investigators found three guns at the scene of the crash after the two teens showed “completely reckless behavior” by streaming themselves live on Instagram during the drive.
Gandhi said that around 3:30 p.m., detectives from the Sheriff’s Office were doing “proactive patrol” to catch gang members. They were trying to pull over a car with an equipment violation, also called a non-moving vehicle code violation, near Broadway and 37th Street in Sacramento’s North Oak Park area.
The silver sedan, which had not been reported stolen, wouldn’t stop, so police chased it at high speed for about 10 minutes, Gandhi said.
Gandhi said that the chase finished on the W-X part of Highway 50, near Fifth and X streets just east of Interstate 5. This is where the fleeing car hit two other cars on the way. He said the teens ran away and left the silver car on fire on the freeway. They jumped off a freeway slope about 15 to 20 feet before they were caught soon after.
Someone crashed their car on the road, and it caught fire. Gandhi said it wasn’t clear what started the fire in the car.
A source for the sheriff’s office said that both teens are “validated gang members.” A few months ago, one of the teens was arrested for leading police on a chase. The teens who were arrested did not have their names released by the Sheriff’s Office because they are still children.
Gandhi said the teens would be checked out by a doctor to make sure they weren’t hurt before they were put into the Sacramento County Juvenile Hall on charges of felony evading police and illegally possessing a firearm.
Gandhi told reporters on Tuesday, “They want to keep talking about these crimes that don’t move and why we do them.” “This is why we catch these people. People like this are dangerous, and you never know what they’ll do next.
He said it was “amazingly” that no one was hurt, not even the kids in the running car.
Gandhi said, “They were live on Instagram while they were on the hunt.” “Look how careless they were about this.” For them, this was just a real-life online game.
