By Eric Adler
The Kansas City Star
KIMBERLING CITY, Mo. —There’s running from the police and then, should the spirit thus inspire, stopping your car in the middle of a bridge, fleeing the car, and diving head first over the bridge rail to plunge 50 feet or more below into the water.
Gavin Thor Lundgren, 26, of Kimberling City, Missouri, made the second choice, police allege.
The incident is on video, captured by Stone County Sheriff’s Office deputies in the wee hours of Saturday morning, July 18, at around 2 a.m., on the Kimberling City Bridge that spans the waters of Table Rock Lake , located some 220 miles south of Kansas City in the Missouri Ozarks.
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The 48-second video, cast in a murky yellow light, depicts the action: sheriff’s deputies, in their cars, with the lights flashing and sirens screaming, drive behind what a probable cause statement would later say was a 2004 Chevrolet Malibu.
Then, about nine second in, the Malibu appears to slow down in the right-hand lane. As the car is still rolling, its driver’s door swings open. At about 17 seconds, the driver’s leg pokes from the car and steps onto the deck of the bridge. He emerges bare-chested and in shorts below his knees.
While the car still rolls slowly, he takes a few stutter steps across the roadway and dives head first over the bridge’s far railing. At 20 seconds into the video, he is gone.
The car door swings shut and continues a lazy roll.
“Contact water patrol,” a sheriff’s deputy says. “He just jumped over the bridge.”
Oops. Driver license left on the passenger’s seat
Four deputies are then seen coming into the frame, approaching the car and casting their flashlights over the bridge’s side.
In his probable cause statement, written just after 5 a.m. Saturday, Stone County Deputy Sheriff Ashton Canfield notes that incident began at about 1:50 a.m. when he clocked the Malibu driving at about 75 miles per hour in a 45-mile-per-hour zone.
“I activated my emergency red and blue lights and audible siren tone and began trying to catch up with the vehicle,” he wrote.
But just as Canfield caught up with the car at an intersection, and turned off his siren, the Malibu drove into a parking lot, went around a building, and reentered a street. He began driving away. By this time, another deputy had pulled up. Siren on again, they were in pursuit, the statement says.
They got to the bridge. Seconds later, the driver left his car and leapt off the east side, “down into the water.”
“The vehicle was in drive and continued to roll forward,” the deputy wrote. He noted that he drew his firearm. No one else was in the car.
“I placed the vehicle in park and saw a Missouri Driver’s license with the name Gavin Lundgren sitting on the passenger seat.”
The image on the license resembled the person who fled, he wrote. Sheriff’s deputies, accompanied by Southern Stone County firefighters, located Lundgren who, the probable cause statement said, tangled with the officers, allegedly headbutting one and leaving two others with cuts and lacerations on their arms and hands and red marks on their faces.
He was booked at 2:22 a.m.
‘Luckily he survived’
Lundgren on Tuesday was being held in the Stone County Jail on four charges: one for aggravated fleeing a stop or detention, one for third-degree assault and two for fourth-degree assault.
“This was definitely a first and luckily he survived the fall,” the Stone County Sheriff’s Office posted on its Facebook page.
Court records show that at the time of his arrest Lundgren was scheduled to appear before a judge in Stone County on July 28 on a charge of damaging jail property.
While in jail in Stone County on May 19 , Lundgren, a probable cause statement said, allegedly ripped the stuffing out of jail cell mattress and crawled inside “to make a sleeping bag.”
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