A 19-year-old man who had recently moved to Prince George from Fort St. John is being held in custody following a hunt for a stolen minivan and reports of two attempted robberies on Tuesday morning.
For Prince George RCMP, the sequence of events began at 9:14 a.m. when they received a report of a minivan stolen from the 2700 block of South Ospika Boulevard.
While officers were dispatched to the area and began making patrols, the detachment received another report, this time of a man matching a description of the vehicle thief, unsuccessfully demanding that a student, near John McInnis Centre on Westwood Drive, hand over his sunglasses and lighter.
That incident occurred at about 9 a.m. but was not reported to police for about a half hour.
Then, at 9:38 a.m., police received a second report of an attempted robbery in the same area, this time on Athlone Avenue, where the suspect allegedly told a man he was armed with a gun and demanded he hand over the keys to his vehicle.
But no gun was produced and when the victim refused, the would-be robber fled.
Police, who continued their search for the minivan, were then called at 10:17 a.m. to a report of a collision in a driveway on Landsdowne Road, off Ferry Avenue, and one of the vehicles was confirmed to be the stolen minivan.
The vehicle was found at the bottom of Lansdowne, and police with the help of a service dog, tracked the suspect up the hill and through the cemetery alongside Highway 16.
The suspect managed to cross the highway and reach Range Road but his escape was thwarted when an alert member of the public called police. After a brief foot chase, he was surrounded near the corner of Range Road and Westwood Drive and by 10:30 a.m. had been arrested and taken into custody without further incident.
The suspect's name was not released Monday.
