Dashcam video shows woman breaking free from handcuffs
SUMTER COUNTY, South Carolina (KTRK) -- A suspect is behind bars after allegedly stealing a police cruiser.
It happened after 21-year-old Mia Thornton had been taken into custody.
Deputies say she was handcuffed in the back seat, but managed to wriggle out of her cuffs and get behind the wheel. The whole incident was caught on a camera inside the patrol car.
Officials say this all started when Thornton was driving her boyfriend's car, and it broke down.
A good samaritan named Freddie Lang picked her up.
Lang's daughter says she found out Thornton crashed Lang's truck by jerking the wheel, hijacking it and eventually wrecking it again before a trooper and a deputy captured her.
Once inside the patrol car, deputies say Thornton slipped out of one handcuff, plunged through a gap between the back seat and the front of the car and hit the gas pedal, narrowly missing two officers.
She led police on a chase that reached 105 miles per hour, but her window started to fog up. Deputies say she kept going until she crashed into a barricade and then, a tree.
Thornton's bond was denied during a hearing Thursday, even after her mother told the judge that her daughter has a history of mental illness.
"I believe a mental evaluation would be appropriate, but I do believe that her actions were not that of a mental person, that she knew what she was doing," Sheriff Anthony Dennis said.
Thornton faces charges including grand larceny and resisting arrest.
