A Bad Day to Get Spotted in Hudson . . .

if you're wanted for something.

Today, on Gossips' normally quiet block, a police car with siren wailing streaked by, heading east. When a second police car screamed past, heading in the same direction, and more sirens could be heard close at hand, I decided to investigate. From my stoop, I saw three or four police vehicles converged at the corner of Allen and Second streets. Then a plain clothes officer, his ID dangling from his neck, ran past, also heading east. Realizing that he was heading around to get behind the row of houses, I went to the back of my house, in time to see him stop in the alley just short of my backyard and to hear him say, "OK, you got 'em."

Back on my stoop, I saw yet another police vehicle arriving and noticed that Chief Moore and Commissioner Graziano were on the scene. It was then that I saw a man reluctantly being escorted to a police car and put inside. Who was this miscreant on my block, and what was his offense?

I still don't know what the man was suspected of doing, but I do know why there was such an incredible show of force. It seems the man, who was wanted for something, was spotted driving in Hudson by an HPD detective, who pursued him onto Tanners Lane. There the suspect ditched his car and fled on foot, heading up the Second Street stairs.

The detective called for assistance, and by coincidence, at that very moment, twenty officers from the Hudson Police Department, the Columbia County Sheriff's Department, and the Greene County Sheriff's Department, who had spent the morning training at the Hudson Police Department's firing range on Newman Road, were heading back to the police station on Warren Street. They all responded.  

When the suspect got to the top of the stairs, he encountered two DPW workers with shovels working to clear a storm drain and the sound of sirens everywhere. He ran through a passageway between two houses into a fenced backyard (no way out except the way he had come in), where he was wrestled to the ground by several officers who at that point had arrived at the scene. 

When the excitement was over, Chief Moore commented: "Quite a scene--but not a murderer or a terrorist."
COPYRIGHT 2015 CAROLE OSTERINK