Handcuffed Florida Driver Attempts Escape Through Window Opened for Google Translate

What happened

According to Gulf Coast News Now, a 32-year-old motorist from Lehigh Acres, Florida, was arrested early Tuesday morning after allegedly driving the wrong way down a roadway and later attempting a bizarre escape from a patrol cruiser. The Florida Highway Patrol reported that the incident began around 6:25 a.m. in Buckingham, when troopers observed a sedan traveling west in the eastbound lanes in an apparent attempt to pass other vehicles.

Troopers conducted a traffic stop and discovered that the license tag on the vehicle was neither registered nor assigned to that sedan. The driver was taken into custody on allegations of reckless driving and a registration violation. Although authorities noted that he initially resisted arrest, officers managed to place him in handcuffs and seat him in the back of a patrol car.

Because of a language barrier, a trooper rolled down the cruiser’s rear passenger-side window to communicate with the driver using Google Translate on a smartphone. While the officer was attempting to converse, the handcuffed driver allegedly tried to squeeze himself out through the open window. Troopers reported that the man managed to get his upper body outside the vehicle before officers intervened, pushed him back into the seat, and transported him to the Lee County Jail on multiple charges, including attempted escape.

Dale Kowalski weighs in

In twenty-two years of local television news, I have covered more traffic stops than I care to remember. Most of them follow a fairly predictable script. A driver speeds. A deputy turns on the red and blue lights. Everyone sits by the shoulder of a two-lane county road waiting for paperwork to print out of a little dashboard machine that never has enough toner. It is boring work. It is supposed to be boring work. When a traffic stop becomes exciting, someone has made a series of very poor choices in rapid succession.

This particular sequence began at 6:25 on a Tuesday morning in Buckingham, Florida. That is a terrible hour to make history. At 6:25 in the morning, most people are still trying to negotiate peace with their coffee maker. The driver in question, a thirty-two-year-old man from Lehigh Acres, was apparently in much more of a hurry. According to the highway patrol, he was heading west in the eastbound lane to try to pass other vehicles. That is how you get pulled over before the sun has even committed to the day.

Things deteriorated from there in that quiet, administrative way that often precedes a disaster. The troopers checked the license plate on the sedan. The plate did not belong to the car. It did not belong to any car, really, because it was completely unassigned. That meant handcuffs. The troopers put the man in the back of the cruiser. At that stage, you are looking at a bad morning, a court date, and an expensive tow truck bill. You sit quietly against the hard plastic seat and wait for the sergeant to finish his notes.

Then came the modern convenience. There was a language barrier between the driver and the arresting trooper. In my early days in news, an officer with a language barrier had to wait by the side of the road for forty minutes until someone from dispatch who took two semesters of conversational Spanish in high school could arrive in an idling Crown Victoria. Today, we have smartphones. The trooper rolled down the rear right window and brought up Google Translate to talk with the driver.

The driver saw that open window not as an electronic bridge across cultures, but as an exit. This was an error in spatial reasoning. Escaping through a cruiser window is difficult under ideal athletic conditions. Doing it while handcuffed behind your back at six in the morning requires an optimism that borders on the miraculous. You have to wiggle your shoulders through a narrow opening while your hands are pinned behind your spine, all while a state trooper is standing right there holding a glowing telephone.

He managed to get his upper torso through the frame before reality, and the troopers, caught up with him. They pushed him back inside. There was no high-speed foot chase across a swamp. There was only a brief, awkward pause, some additional paperwork, and a ride to the Lee County Jail with the window rolled firmly up.

I have always believed that most human trouble comes from people trying to fix a small mistake with a much larger one. You put the wrong plate on your sedan. Then you drive into oncoming traffic. Then you try to slither like an eel out of a police vehicle that someone was just trying to translate for you. Now you have five charges instead of a ticket, and your morning is completely ruined.

That’s the news. Somebody had to say it.