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Question: You've just stolen a "bait package" (a decoy package with a tracker planted inside by police), it's a little after 6:40 p.m., you're in a Denny's parking lot in Hacienda Heights, and now patrol cars are swarming you. Where do you go? If you're Christopher Cook, 27, you dump the package and flee into the veins of the Los Angeles freeway system.
In a stolen 2017 Hyundai Sonata, Cook led police on a chase down the 60 freeway, to the 710, and onto the 5—reaching speeds of 110 mph and up at times. Hitting traffic on the 5 (hey, reality is a cold dose of water) Cook exited back onto surface streets through Commerce, Bell, and down to South Gate, where he eventually jumped out of his vehicle and ran into the Edwards theaters on Firestone Boulevard around 7:45 p.m., notes KTLA.
The plan may have worked in theory: run into a crowded theater and then calmly walk back out with the masses as they are evacuated in your search. But, reality, cold water, you know the drill.
Cook, instead, ran into a near-empty screening of the Tom Hanks film The Circle. Security had asked the three people in the theater not wanted on suspicion of theft, evading arrest, and possession of a stolen vehicle to leave.
“At first I was really scared because I thought, you know, I didn’t know what was going on,” Debbie Lopez, one of the three in the theater, told KCBS. “And the fact I didn’t know what was going on, got me more scared.”
By 9 p.m., officers had entered the theater and took Cook into custody. The Los Angeles Times adds that he is being held in lieu of $115,000 bail. No word on if he liked the film.
