A woman who allegedly stole a Portland mail truck on New Year’s Eve is spending the weekend in Clark County’s jail, unidentified.
She wasn’t carrying an ID on her 70-mph race up Interstate 5 from Portland to La Center Thursday night.
“She’s given a name, but we can’t verify it,” Trooper Steve Schatzel, a Washington State Patrol spokesman, said Friday.
Contrary to early reports, she’s no longer thought to be a U.S. Postal Service worker.
Schatzel said he expects a technician to take her fingerprints Monday to see if she’s in the national fingerprint database. The fingerprint matching procedure has taken a full day in the past, he said.
Police said the woman was carrying a purse worth $2,000 and a wallet worth $600, with the Nordstrom sales tags still attached.
WSP Sgt. Thomas Butsch said late Thursday that officials think the woman walked into the postal center parking lot in downtown Portland and stole the small truck, which was undergoing maintenance and had the keys in the ignition.
With police in pursuit, she raced up Interstate 5 to the truck scales near Ridgefield. There she drove over a spike strip that slowly deflated three of the truck’s tires.
She then left the highway at the La Center exit and fled on foot from the mail truck.
When troopers finally caught her, the woman clammed up.
“She tried to spit on a couple of my troopers and she won’t talk otherwise,” Butsch said at the time.
Officials said they were aware of no collisions or injuries during the chase.
The driver was jailed on suspicion of attempting to elude police, resisting arrest and possessing stolen property, Schatzel said Friday.
Homeless man robbed
Two young men intimidated a 43-year-old homeless man in Central Vancouver into giving them his wallet Friday, police said.
The two men, in their 20s and wearing gray hooded sweatshirts, approached the man near the Burgerville restaurant at Fourth Plain and St. Johns boulevards and ordered him to give them his wallet, Vancouver police Officer Ilia Botvinnik said.
“It was some sort of intimidation, but there was no actual weapon there,” Botvinnik said.
The men then left on foot, and the transient immediately flagged down a police car, according to Botvinnik.
