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Joseph Meacham decided to drive drunk one night in St. Louis, and this was just the first bad decision in a long string of many. After he got pulled over by the police, he pushed the closest cop over and made a beeline for freedom, evidently assuming that the cops would balk at chasing him and forget the whole thing.
Without any kind of plan beyond putting as much distance between himself and the police as possible, Meacham ran into the first building he saw in an attempt to hide. He made it only a short distance before he noticed that a lot of the people working there had blue uniforms and badges. Yes, the building he’d chosen was the St. Louis police headquarters.
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If only there’d been some type of warning.
Witnesses would later report that he flew into a decent impression of a bird trapped in a hallway, running in circles and bolting in different directions whenever he spotted a uniform. Lt. Bryan Ludwig was sitting in his office, looked up and saw a man running at a full sprint heading right for him.After a thorough yet brief tour of the police HQ, Meacham eventually ran down the wrong hallway and found himself at a dead end. The police, most of whom had no idea who this guy was or what he was doing there, cautiously closed in, expecting a struggle from what was clearly some kind of dangerous lunatic. Instead, he simply laid down on the floor and curled into a ball. It was like he finally triggered some failsafe in his brain that just shut down his limbs before he could mess things up any further.
“You know we joking afterwards because he actually ran towards the jail first and then came back this way,” Ludwig said. “We were joking he should have cut out the middle man and gone straight to the jail.”
Lt. Ludwig says the man was panting hard, and appeared to be intoxicated. Clayton police have him now, and haven’t released his identity or why he chose to flee police.