Woman, Tired of Waiting at Hospital, Steals an Ambulance to Drive Home
Anyone who has ever been to the hospital knows that the wait times can be extremely long, making for a frustrating experience. Twenty-eight year-old Mindy Jones of Del City, Oklahoma was experiencing that same frustration early Friday morning when she decided she had had enough and was ready to go home. Unfortunately for Ms. Jones, she did not have a vehicle at the hospital because she was there awaiting a blood test after being arrested for DUI following a hit-and-run. Ms. Jones, operating on “no car, no problem” philosophy, refused to be deterred and decided that she would just grab a spare ambulance from the hospital parking lot and drive herself home. After leading police on a fifty-mile chase from the hospital to her home, she politely parked the ambulance in her driveway before being arrested. Her deep remorse became evident when, upon being arrested in her driveway, she told reporters that she “had the ambulance and had a pretty good time driving it.”
Ms. Jones will obviously face a variety of charges, but one that is not often dealt with is the offense of joyriding. Joyriding is the unauthorized use of automobiles or other vehicles and is chargeable any time a person “takes another's automobile, airplane, motorcycle, bicycle, boat or other vehicle without the consent of the owner and the person does not have the intent to deprive the owner thereof.” The lack of intent to deprive the owner of the vehicle is included in the definition to distinguish the offense of joyriding from the offense of theft, which is where someone takes another’s vehicle with the intent to deprive them of that vehicle permanently.
Ms. Jones would more than likely be charged with joyriding rather than theft because it is unlikely that she took the ambulance with the intent to deprive the hospital of it on a permanent basis as indicated by her statement that she had a pretty good time driving the vehicle which reveals her intent behind taking it initially. This is clearly an indication that she just wanted to take a spin in an ambulance one time for the enjoyment of doing so rather than an attempt to steal an ambulance for her own permanent use. Her actions in parking the car at her house rather than returning it to the hospital may seem to indicate that she did intend to keep the vehicle, but Ms. Jones would have an effective argument upon facing a theft charge that it would be pretty hard to return the ambulance to the hospital with the police in pursuit. It seems far more likely given the nature of the vehicle (how hard it would be to get away with stealing an ambulance) and Ms. Jones’s demeanor that she would be charged with joyriding rather than theft. Joyriding is a Class A misdemeanor in Tennessee, punishable by up to eleven months and twenty-nine days in jail.
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