A high-speed police pursuit ended in Oak Harbor April 14 with a suspect suspended by a seatbelt inside a crashed car after it rolled four times, according to court records.
The man, 28-year-old Angel C. Guina, miraculously escaped injury but is now facing charges. Prosecutors charged him in Island County Superior Court June 12 with attempting to elude a pursuing police vehicle and assault in the third degree, for allegedly driving his vehicle into a cop car.
The police chase started when an Oak Harbor police office noticed a Toyota Camry driving without lights on just before 11 p.m. The officer attempted to make a traffic stop.
The car traveled without stopping, continually “swaying” from one side of the roadway to the other as it traveled through residential streets in the north end of the city. The car narrowly missed striking parked cars as well as an oncoming vehicle, the officer wrote.
The officer was traveling at 80 mph but the car continued to pull away, continuing at a high rate of speed on North Oak Harbor Street, the report states. The driver of the car, later identified as Guina, attempted to turn onto Ault Field Road, but he locked up his brakes and the car slid across three lanes of traffic, the officer wrote.
The officer attempted to perform a high-risk vehicle stop, but the driver put the car into reverse and backed into the police car with enough force to bend the push bar and crack the bumper, the report states. The car then sped off on Ault Field Road, “swerving from fog line to fog line in an arcing motion, losing control of the vehicle on the third swerve,” the officer wrote.
The car spun 180 degrees, hit the ditch on the other side of the road and rolled four times, landing with the passenger side facing down.
The officer found Guina in the driver’s seat, suspended by the seatbelt. Firefighters with North Whidbey Fire and Rescue stabilized the car, cut away the windshield and pulled Guina out. He did not appear to be injured and he denied having any injuries, but paramedics took him to the hospital as a precaution.
The officer noted that Guina’s speech was slurred and he seemed disoriented. The officer found suspected fentanyl pills inside the car and obtained a search warrant for a sample of Guina’s blood for testing, the report states.
