A Cuba (Mo.) man celebrated his 39th birthday Sunday (Jan. 31) by allegedly stealing and crashing three trucks, the last of which was attached to a 35-foot trailer loaded with a Bobcat skid-steer loader.
The spree ended when the southbound truck crossed the center line of Hwy. 61 in the Crystal City area and ran into a northbound vehicle driven by a 52-year-old De Soto woman, sending her to the hospital with serious injuries.
The man, John Michael Cullen Jr., was arrested by the Missouri State Highway Patrol after a Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office canine unit found him near Danby Road and Hwy. 61 in the Festus area early Monday, nine hours after the first crash.
When he was arrested, Cullen told officers he had taken “90 Xanax,” the probable-cause statement said.
He has been charged with six felonies – two counts each of stealing a motor vehicle and leaving the scene of an accident, along with one count of stealing property worth more than $25,000 and one count of assault. Cullen was in the Jefferson County Jail Tuesday morning (Feb. 2), and the Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office had filed a motion for a $75,000 cash-only bond.
The first report of a crashed vehicle was at 9:08 p.m. Sunday, after a 2008 Chevrolet Silverado had run off Hwy. 61 near Bryan Road in the Crystal City area and struck a tree, according to the probable-cause statement submitted by the arresting officer, Trooper Deryk Weber.
The truck was registered to the Missouri Department of Transportation and had been stolen from a MoDOT shed lot on Airport Road in Crystal City.
The trooper who handled that call, Keith Kaiser, got another call at 11:03 p.m. that a 2001 Dodger Dakota had crashed through the I-55 median strand barrier at the 169.4 mile marker south of Festus.
As with the first crash, there was no one in or around the vehicle when the trooper arrived. The truck was owned by a 60-year man who lived near the site of the first crash. When contacted by troopers, he said his truck had been stolen.
Weber, who wrote the probable-cause statement, responded to a call at 1:08 a.m. about a vehicle theft in progress in the 3500 block of Phyllis Road, which was close to the site of the second crash. The homeowner told troopers he had seen a white male running from his residence toward I-55 when he came outside to investigate.
Troopers found several items dropped by the suspect that were believed to have been removed from the second truck. The Phyllis Road vehicle was not stolen.
At 4:49 a.m., Weber responded to another vehicle theft in the 12700 block of Waggoner Road south of Festus. A Dodge Ram pickup, with the trailer and Bobcat, had been taken.
As he was responding, Weber was notified that a vehicle matching that description had crashed nearby, on Hwy. 61 near Danby Road.
It had run into a 2001 Chevrolet Impala driven by the De Soto woman, Tammi R. Crews, who was still in her vehicle when officers arrived. She had a laceration to her head, chest contusions and fractured toes.
After Cullen was apprehended, he was taken to Mercy Hospital Jefferson in Crystal City for treatment, where he declined to give blood or urine samples, according to the probable-cause statement.
Crystal City received two calls Sunday night they believe were connected to Cullen’s spree.
At 11 p.m., there was a report of a 1999 Dodge pickup broken into on the parking lot of Mercy Hospital Jefferson.
“Officers found a shotgun and a bow on the ground near the truck,” Crystal City Police Capt. Mike Pruneau said. “He (Cullen) left his medical discharge papers in the truck. He’d decided to rummage through the truck and just threw those other items out.
“Later we got another call of somebody creeping around in the backyard of a home on Airport Road near ABS Storage,” Pruneau said.