Hitchhiker says he was held hostage by driver of alleged stolen vehicle

An Anchorage man got a little more than he bargained for May 26 when he accepted a ride while attempting to hitchhike to Fairbanks.

Lance Whitman said he was basically a hostage in a vehicle that turned out to be stolen out of Fairbanks. After a short pursuit in Wasilla, and a slightly longer sit in the back of a patrol car, Whitman said he wanted to share his side of the incident which, he said, involved officers and patrol vehicles from Wasilla Police Department and Alaska State Troopers.

Whitman said last Friday started with a goal of getting to Fairbanks to enjoy the three-day Memorial Day holiday weekend.

“I was hitchhiking and got as far as Trapper Creek,” Whitman said adding by late afternoon, he realized he had too far to go and not enough day to get there. “I decided to turn around in Trapper Creek. At about 5:30, a guy picked me up.”

Whitman said the driver informed him his name was Jeff and the two set out for Anchorage.

“The guy was driving 85 miles an hour. We got to Wasilla in an hour,” Whitman said. Whitman said he was a little, but not overly concerned about the ride to that point. “I wasn’t a hostage at that point.”

However, that was about to change. Still headed toward Wasilla on Parks Highway, Whitman said a Wasilla Police Department patrol car attempted to pull the vehicle over.

“I saw the flashing lights behind us and he pulled off on the shoulder. I thought there were cops in front of us,” Whitman said hoping the ordeal had come to a conclusion. “Then he punched the clutch.”

From there, the remainder of the journey was chaos. Whitman said AST patrol vehicles joined in the mix as the driver headed for the center of the Parks Highway.

“There were vehicles to the right of us and to the left. At that point I said ‘Let me out, please’. But (the driver) wanted to get away.”

Whitman said patrol vehicles had formed a roadblock at an intersection although he was uncertain which one it was.

“The driver jumped three curbs to get onto a different road and then all four tires were on rims,” Whitman said, noting driving over the curbs and medians had popped the tire beads causing them to go flat. “We were fish-tailing really bad.”

Whitman said at that point in the ordeal, the driver stopped at a berm, got out of the vehicle, and ran into the forest.

“There were eight cops total but they couldn’t get him,” Whitman said. Police then turned their attention back to the vehicle he was sitting in. “I come out of the car. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. They told me to ‘get on your knees’…the whole (police) ritual. All of a sudden I was looking at two AR-15’s (assault rifles).”

Whitman said he was cuffed and placed into a patrol car while police tried to sort things out. Whitman said he let the driver use his cell phone to make a call and police used that to try and verify the driver’s identity. Officers used that to contact the person the driver called to confirm identity.

“After about 45 minutes, an officer came over and said ‘You can take the cuffs off. He’s clear.”

Whitman said he was told by a trooper that the driver’s real name was believed to be Jason. According to an AST spokesperson, the troopers involved with the incident were not available Thursday morning. The spokeswoman did provide information about a “Jason” being charged for first-degree vehicle theft and failure to stop at the direction of a peace officer and reckless driving.

Online court records indicate a person with that first name was arraigned on those charges in Palmer Court Saturday. The court file was not available by Thursday afternoon’s press deadline so the Frontiersman was not able to confirm if the individual on the court docket is the same one involved in the chase. The charged man, who has an Anchorage address, was represented by a public defender with bail set at $5,000 cash appearance and $5,000 cash corporate plus a court-appointed third party.

Whitman said he was a little shaken up over the whole ordeal which came to a conclusion around 8 p.m. When asked if officers at the scene commented on his unfortunate circumstances, Whitman said one of the troopers complimented him on his jacket.