A St. Petersburg police sergeant on Monday crashed into a wrong-way driver’s car to force it off a one-way street as oncoming traffic approached, police said.
A police officer spotted the driver of a Honda Accord heading the wrong way on First Avenue South at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street about 11:50 a.m., according to police. The officer attempted a traffic stop but got into a minor crash with another vehicle, police said. The wrong-way driver continued west on First Avenue.
Sgt. Michael Schade, who is a member of the police department’s traffic unit, got behind the Honda with lights and sirens activated but the driver still did not stop, police said.
With three lanes of oncoming traffic approaching, Schade decided to crash into the Honda and forced it off the road near 24th Street, according to police.
The Honda spun out and crashed through a fence along First Avenue, a police spokesperson said in an email.
“Thanks to Sgt. Schade’s quick action, no one was injured,” the police department said in a news release.
Police arrested the driver, 49-year-old Shawn Michael Schmidhuber of St. Petersburg, on two counts of fleeing and eluding a police officer and one count of driving under the influence.
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