MEMPHIS, Tenn. — What should have been a simple traffic stop turned into a wild time for a Memphis man who allegedly used false IDs, swallowed marijuana, escaped from a police cruiser and got away for several hours.
Kentrell Harris sat behind bars Thursday.
It started Tuesday afternoon, when police pulled over his friend on Highland for a cracked windshield. Harris was a passenger in the vehicle.
When an officer asked him his name, he allegedly gave them Social Security numbers that belonged to other men. Police arrested him, but he tried to escape and had to be taken to the ground, police said.
That’s when he told them he had a bag of weed in his mouth, and that he had swallowed some and spit out the rest. “It was just a dime bag,” he allegedly told officers.
Once he was handcuffed inside a police vehicle, Harris asked officers to roll down a window, saying “I gotta spit.” He had managed to work one of his hands out of his cuffs, police said.
When officers rolled down the window, a court affidavit states Harris reached through the window bars, opened the rear door from the outside, and ran away.
Police found him hiding in a closet on Highland about 24 hours later.
WREG checked on some of the identities Harris allegedly used. We went to one of the addresses and a man who was clearly not Harris said he didn’t know Harris and had no idea his Social Security number was being used.
Harris is charged with criminal impersonation, resisting official detention, evading arrest, escape, tampering with evidence and theft.
