MIAMI (WSVN) - A woman is demanding answers after, she said, a man she believes to be a police officer rear-ended her car at a Miami intersection and took off before she decided to chase after him.
Esther King said she never thought she would find herself in such an unusual situation.
“He’s a cop! He hit me and ran!” she said. “He’s supposed to protect and serve.”
King said the vehicular odyssey began at the corner of Northwest 54th Street and 11th Avenue on Sunday, at around 10:30 a.m.
She said she had stopped at the intersection when she felt the impact.
“I look in the rearview mirror, I see police lights,” she said. “I panicked. I was startled. I jumped out of the car, and I went to the officer.”
King got out of her vehicle and approached the man who was behind the wheel of a gray Ford Expedition. What he told her left her feeling confused.
“He said, ‘I thought you left. I thought you were going to go.’ I said, ‘Sir, I never took my feet off of the gas pedal.’ He said, ‘I thought you were gonna go,’ and then he says, ‘Both of us are in trouble.'”
King said the Expedition had a blue interior police light. Based on that and her brief interaction with the driver, she assumed he must have been a plainclothes officer.
And then, King said, he fled.
“He told me to ‘get out of the road and we’re going to write a report.’ He took off,” she said.
So she went after him.
“I’m shocked. I’m running around here between 54th and 51st Street, chasing a cop? It’s crazy,” she said.
King lost him a short time later.
City of Miami Police confirmed they are investigating but added their undercover officers don’t drive Ford Expeditions. They said the driver in Sunday’s accident may have seen a security guard or someone posing as an officer.
But King is convinced otherwise. “For a cop to hit me with very minimal damage and take me through a neighborhood doing 70, 80 miles an hour, do you know how many lives he put at stake?” she said. “He put not only my life but a lot of other lives in the neighborhood at stake.”
King said the entire incident was caught on video. Police will be retrieving that footage.
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