Thanks to wind restrictions, woman flees her abductor
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Version 0 of 1. A woman abducted by her ex-boyfriend managed to get help because her kidnapper was trying to transport his surfboards on a windy day, authorities said. The victim first called 911 on Sunday to say that her ex-boyfriend had broken into her home in Powellville, Md., and was taking her away, the Wicomico County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. The man, Phillip James Timmons, had previously been accused of assaulting her twice and was under a court order to stay away from her. But he forced open her door that day, the sheriff’s office said. By the time deputies arrived, the man and woman were gone. The sheriff’s office put out an alert to other law enforcement officers to look for Timmons and his Dodge Dakota truck. And they eventually got a call — from one of the region’s most unusual roads, more than 100 miles south of Powellville near the bottom of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel — a 17-mile engineering marvel that is a bridge, until it enters the water to become a tunnel, and a bridge again, and a tunnel again — has its own police force. On Sunday, the Bridge-Tunnel police stopped Timmons to say that he could not cross the Bridge-Tunnel with two surfboards in the open back of the truck, because it was too windy. Instead, the police put the surfboards in a work van to drive them across. On the other side, while Timmons was busy unloading the surfboards from the work van, the victim got into the driver’s seat of his truck and drove toward a police car that she saw. Timmons jumped into the truck bed, the sheriff’s office said, and tried to reach through a broken window of his truck to unlock the door. The victim got out of the truck and ran toward the police officer, saying that she had been kidnapped and that Timmons had a gun, according to the sheriff’s office. Timmons, who did have a loaded handgun, was arrested on firearms and kidnapping charges. |