By Eric Francis, Daybreak Correspondent

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, 10/23/24

A stolen car containing guns and drugs was the focus of a chaotic scene Tuesday morning in the wooded areas around the I-89/I-91 interchange in White River Junction.

Just before 8 a.m. Hartford Police received a tip from the Springfield VT Police Department that a car which reportedly had been carjacked from their town had been seen in a hotel parking lot not far from the Veterans Administration Hospital.

Hartford Patrol Officer Mike Goslin drove around to the rear corner of the White River Holiday Inn Express & Suites and spotted the gray Toyota RAV4, which was occupied by a driver and two passengers in the rear seat.

As other officers began arriving for backup, police ordered the driver to exit the car at gunpoint, detaining him in the back of a cruiser.

The original driver of the allegedly stolen car is arrested in the parking lot immediately behind the White River Holiday Inn Express & Suites. All photos © Eric Francis.

Police then ordered the first of the backseat passengers to do exit the car, as well. When that individual, a male with dreadlocks who had been sitting directly behind the driver, did so, it quickly became apparent that he was in no mood to comply with the officers’ orders.

Fearing the suspect was about to flee on foot, Officer Goslin left his cruiser with his canine Atlas at the ready.

“Once he saw the dog, he jumped into the driver’s seat of the vehicle and began to operate it.  He actually backed into my patrol vehicle,” Goslin said. “Once he’d struck my cruiser, he drove forward about 50 yards down the parking lot” before crashing through a timber rail fence at the rear corner of the lot and flying into the air—at which point gravity took over and the car crashed down on all four wheels at the base of a steep embankment, flattening part of a steel fence that runs alongside Interstate 89.

The car went airborne off a corner of the parking lot before crashing nearly 50 feet into the woods, landing atop deer fencing that runs through the woods alongside Interstate 89.

“The other passenger, who was still in the back seat, sustained minor injuries…he exited with his hands up and he walked himself up the slope, at which point he was taken into custody,” Goslin recalled.

The suspect in the driver’s seat got himself out of the vehicle and took off, running farther down the slope and across the northbound lanes of Interstate 89 heading in the general direction of the Upper Valley Aquatic Center, before he disappeared.

While other officers swooped onto the interstate in cruisers to try to prevent the suspect from possibly attempting to carjack a passing vehicle, Goslin was joined by two other officers who started to track the man with the aid of K-9 Atlas.

Tow Truck Operator Sam Taylor of Legendary Auto Works fishes the totaled Toyota RAV4 out of the woods.

After running along a tree line and crossing over the median to where the southbound on-ramp to Interstate 91 peels off of I-89, the police dog led the trio straight to the suspect.

”We couldn’t see him until we were within in ten feet of him.  He was hunkered down in some thick brush,” Goslin recalled.  “He made it approximately half a mile before he was taken into custody.”

The man, later identified as Tyron Harris, 25, of Holyoke, Massachusetts, had some blood on his face and appeared to be drifting in and out of consciousness, so police made the decision to place him in an ambulance and have him taken to Mount Ascutney Hospital for evaluation.

Hartford Canine Officer Mike Goslin and his partner Atlas search the car, which police later said contained eight-and-a-half ounces of cocaine and several handguns.