A naked man in a stolen car carried out a hit and run spree in Surrey and Langley on Sunday morning until police surrounded and arrested him.
“It is really lucky that no one was hurt,” said Cpl. Elenore Sturko of the Surrey RCMP.
The police were first alerted that something was going on at 9:45 a.m., when a break and enter was reported in the 17600-block of 20th Avenue in South Surrey, Sturko said.
The resident’s vehicle was also taken in the theft.
A short time after, there were two more calls to police, as car owners nearby reported someone had stolen licence plates off two different vehicles. Next, the vehicle, now bearing the stolen plates, crashed through a fence around the 19300-block of 73rd Avenue.
Sturko said that the stolen car arrived in Langley’s Willoughby area around 10:30 a.m. as RCMP received numerous reports of an erratic driver, including multiple collisions.
Sturko could not say if the collisions involved other moving cars or only stationary objects, but she said no pedestrians were reported to be hit.
Sometime around this time, a resident in Langley caught video images of the naked driver, who abandoned his car for a time and was seen running around a field near the road. In the video, he hides under tree branches for a few minutes, then runs back and forth across the property, before climbing back into the vehicle and clumsily driving back onto the road.
The man was only wearing shoes in the video, and was intermittently covering his genitals with one hand.
Finally, police caught up with the driver after the car crashed through a fence at a commercial site in the 9300-block of 192nd Street in Surrey around 11 a.m.
The car became stuck and the man tried to flee on foot, but he was surrounded by Surrey and Langley RCMP along with police dog team members and officers from the Integrated Road Safety Unit.
He was arrested unharmed.
“Looks like there was a fair amount of property damage,” Sturko said the spree, which lasted a little more than an hour.
Tyson Joseph Ryan, a 26-year-old Kelowna man, now faces charges of break and enter, theft of a motor vehicle, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, flight from police, failure to stop, and two counts of theft under $5,000.
