Clay County Police received a call on Sunday around 1:00 a.m. reporting a man driving erratically in a forklift. The caller also noted that the driver didn’t appear to be a construction worker. Probably knowing that even construction workers aren’t driving forklifts around in the middle of the night on a Sunday, they quickly responded to the scene.
Twenty-two-year-old Florida man, Aaron Powell, had stolen a forklift from a local heavy equipment rental facility and was taking it on a joyride. Forklifts require operators to have authorization and training that’s renewed every three years, but Powell had none of these, nor did he have a valid driver’s license. The stack of violations was slowly rising.
The police department was calling it a low-speed chase as forklifts don’t travel very fast. However, ignoring police lights and sirens, Powell didn’t stop his forklift frenzy for eight miles from the beginning of the pursuit, crossing county lines in the process. He was finally arrested in a gas station parking lot.
That stack of violations ended up being substantial: grand theft, fleeing and eluding the police, refusal of field sobriety test, trespassing (to commit the grand theft), second offense of driving with suspended license, and the cherry on top, a ticket for running a red light throughout all of this. His merry jaunt landed him in jail with a $29,010 bond.
Area resident Justin Jean got the whole thing on video, in which you can see the forklift cruising through an intersection with two lit up, sirens-blaring police vehicles on his tail, all going comically slow.
“It was entertaining, but in the same sense it was scary because he could’ve definitely done a lot of damage with that heavy equipment,” Jean said of the peculiar incident.
This Florida man’s felonious forklift foibles have certainly landed him in hot water. Never did we think we’d need to tell people to resist the urge to steal a forklift for a midnight romp, but here we are, graced by the fabulous fables of Florida. Heed the moral.
