BRISTOL, Tenn. – The sedan involved in a high-speed police chase Monday was stolen from a used car dealership in the Sunshine State, police said Wednesday.
The red 2007 Chevy Malibu was lifted over a year ago, on May 24, 2008, in a brazen daylight heist, according to the Fern Park, Fla., car lot’s owner.
On Monday, a fugitive from Florida named Jeffrey Allen Phelps, 50, led police on a lunchtime pursuit starting at the Old Airport Road Marathon station near Exit 7 in Bristol, Va.
The car raced on and off the interstate for 20 minutes, ramping curbs and smacking into various inanimate objects. The chase finally wound to a close near the Arby’s on Volunteer Parkway in Bristol, Tenn., when the Malibu sputtered to an anti-climatic halt due to a busted radiator, damaged miles earlier on a Bristol, Va., curb.
The stolen car was filled with stuff, from a life jacket and frisbee to Willie Nelson’s Greatest Hits. The missing license plate, the original reason police stopped the car, was unearthed from the trunk among bags of trash and junk.
Phelps, who according to police has a 16-page rap sheet, had one passenger, a 50-year-old woman named Donna Jefferson.
Down in Florida, Bill Anderson, the owner of Payless Car Sales, vividly remembers the day the red Chevy Malibu tore off the lot, and not just because it’s the only time in his 30 years hawking cars that one’s been stolen from under his nose.
“He almost ran me over with it,” Anderson said.
A man walked onto the lot, Anderson said, which he thought was peculiar because people tend to drive to the car store. The man told him said he’d been a block down the road at the transmission shop and decided to buy a new car instead of getting his old one fixed.
He asked if he could see the Malibu and Anderson gave him the keys, assuming he would just start it up to see how it ran. The prospective buyer went so far as to call his wife and ask her to bring some money over.
Another customer came in and as Anderson went to wait on them, the man slammed the Malibu into reverse and charged backwards, straight at Anderson.
Bristol Tennessee Police Captain Charlie Thomas said the man Anderson described to police that day – a 5-foot-5-inch white, slender man, about 51 years old – is similar to Phelps, who is 5-foot-9, weighs 150 pounds and is 50 years old.
“There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to him,” Thomas said.
Anderson said the car had a retail value of about $10,000.
“It was one of the least-expensive cars on the lot; and we had some nice ones – Lincolns, Mercedes, all kinds,” Anderson said. “But maybe his dream car was a four-cylinder Malibu.”
cgalofaro@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2531
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